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Originally Posted by Peter Chung
Can you expound on your stretch routine? Do you focus on stretching your arms and back only or your whole body?
As for the shoes, I am having a hard time locating the Turntec brand. I had never heard of them until you mentioned them but they seem to exist only on ebay?
Thanks, Stephen.
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Peter, in the first place, any exercise and flexibility program must be started slowly and carefully. If you have any special problems with your back or joints, then even more care must be taken. I started my athletic training when I was age 4, so I've had plenty of time to develop my routines and allow my body to safely tolerate them. A life that includes a good diet with enough calcium and also adequate sunlight to generate Vitamin D, is needed to have strong bones. There's other ways to get calcium and Vitamin D, but if they come from natural sources, they are much more effective than what you get from supplements. However, I do take daily supplements of glucosamine and MSM for my joints and it really works. I'll be 67 in a few months and I'm functioning better than I did when I was 1/3 my age.
For flexibility, I usually start with simple movements. I bend over and touch my fingers and then my palms to the floor, doing about a dozen repetitions. Then, I squat all the way down and come up 6 times. I spread my legs out and do 12 lateral rotations, touching my opposite hands to the floor, two feet past my feet. Then, I go down on my knees and bend all the way back, touching the back of my head to the floor several times, holding it there for several seconds. I stand and raise one foot to a bar that is 5 feet off the floor and bend forward, touching my chin to my knee several times and reversing sides. Then, I grab a doorknob for steadiness and bend laterally at the waist in the opposite direction and hold it for several seconds and repeat 6 times on each side. This is to stretch the ilio-tibial bands (IT bands) that run down the outside of the legs, from the pelvis to below the knees. If the IT bands become too tight, they may cause severe pain along the outside of the knees or hips. In addition, I do many strength exercises that also serve to increase flexibility, such as lateral rotations when standing and doing a two-handed pull on a handle from a cable and pulley machine, at chest height.
I do quite a few exercises when hanging from overhead bars that are parallel and 20 inches apart. These include pullups, straight-leg or bent-knee raises and lateral rotations. I may do these exercises at a fitness club or use the full set of apparatus I've incorporated into the structure of my garage and covered patio. There's also a lot of hard bike riding, running, weightlifting, foundation gymnastics exercises and Kayak paddling in my activities. I've pretty much had to give up ball sports, as there's no time for them. I hope you can pick some useful ideas from this. Good luck in your own workouts.
You should be able to find Turntec running shoes at many of the better athletic shoe stores. I get them at a cut rate at a Big5 store, that's part of a large chain. The parent company of Turntec is American Sporting Goods, which also owns Avia and several other brands. The owner of this company and also the brilliant design engineer who developed the shoes, is Jerry Turner. He's the one who overhauled the shoes made by Brooks, before he started his own company.
Charles, those semi-hightop shoes look very substantial. I can imagine how they would have all the characteristics your demanding work would require. If I didn't have the burden of carrying a strong personal prejudice against that company and its products, I'd probably want to give them a try. This is odd, as I was the first paying customer they ever had, being a friend of their original sales agent.