Elliptical update

After spending twenty minutes on the elliptical yesterday, I woke up this morning with sore muscles.  Without any excruciating hip pain that I would have associated with about twenty minutes of any kind of activity pre-op.  It is pretty amazing.  If I managed to survive for 20 minutes doing that type of activity, I would have needed extra meds before bed, would have suffered with little sleep and probably would have still been limping and in pain today.

I stepped up pretty quickly from the 15 minutes that I did on Monday.  I was probably feeling a little bit over confident after smashing the 90 degree mark and it's gone ok.  I'm a little tired today and won't finish up with that many minutes today but tomorrow I plan to do 20 again.  I figure if I stick to that for a couple of days and get my body used to that activity, I should be able to add another 4 or 5 minutes pretty soon.

More than 90 Degrees!

Today my right hip flexion got to a passive range of 93 degrees.  This is a large jump up from where I was last week and over the magic 90 degree mark that I have been aiming for.  The left is still below, at 80-something degrees (I was so focused on the 90 number, I can't remember the other one) but thats ok.  There was still improvement on the right side and it would have still been an improvement that I would have been happy with, especially with the plateau of last weeks measurements.

I was so excited that I wanted to jump...  I didn't!  I'll save it for the pool on Friday.

Today was a good day for the elliptical as well.  I've stepped up to 15 minutes from my previous 12.  I completed this in two sessions and I think that I could probably even go a third session but I want to wake up in the morning first and see how I feel.  I am using level 2 on the ramp and resistance for most of the time.  I figure that I can get to 30 minutes and then I can increase the resistance and ramp throughout the period and maybe even use some of the proper programmes rather than manual settings.

End of Financial Year Craziness

And so it starts.  It is my busy time of year and the craziness has begun.  The next two weeks will really be a test of how rehabilitated I really am.  The extra days of work that I picked up about two weeks ago were to start the setup of a new digital setup for cut over at the start of the new financial year. The work that I started a month or so ago has all of the end of year things to do like payment summaries and the like.  Between the two of them, I'm busier than I have been in a very long time.  I'm trying to keep work on just the three days a week so I have four days to make sure that everything else gets done.  I haven't done so well yet as little things are creeping into other days as I'm capping out at about five - six hours of work in a day and some days I really need a little bit more than that.  Mostly this is because of the amount of data entry that I need to get done at the moment to set up this new system.  I don't think that my brain was working properly when I estimated how long the task would actually take.  My brain is getting back into gear as I get back into things.  It's almost there (the setup and my brain!) and I will be going back in tomorrow to keep working on it.  Tomorrow is expected to be a big day so today was a work day reprieve so that I could get a few other things done.

Today's big activity was grocery shopping, which I managed on my own.  I also got all of the groceries into the house by myself, put them away and then organised dinner.  It wasn't a full shop as it is an in between week, so I've started off a little easier on myself.  The last time I went grocery shopping, I went with my husband and he brought everything in so even though it has been less, I still did it by myself.

I'm still at six minutes on the elliptical today.  I was supposed to go up to seven but by the time I had the groceries away and had cooked dinner, I hit the wall and the second session only went to two and a half.  It doesn't sound like much but it is for me at the moment.  My cardio fitness is pretty disgraceful at the moment and will take a little while to recoup.  I haven't been able to do any real cardio activity for quite some time so I'm not overly surprised at the level that I'm starting from.  On the plus side, even though the muscles are fatiguing quite quickly, they are holding up to a lot faster movement than I expected at this early stage.  I'm not quite sure how the speed equates to walking due to the differences in the stride length but for me I think that averaging between 3 - 5 km/hr is definitely a great start.  If I can maintain this speed and improve my stamina, I think I would increase the resistance and incline as part of the program before trying to speed it up anymore.

I'm not quite sure what my walking speed is like at the moment and can't really think of a great way to measure it.  I had thought about using a pedometer when I go out to get a rough idea but it didn't really work out.   I tried using it around the house to count steps but it looks like I still have too much sway as it is counting too many steps.  I had wanted to record the number of steps each day to see the increase in my activity but it looks like it will have to wait for a little while longer.

Arrival of our Elliptical

This morning our elliptical machine arrived and I have already added it into my rehab program.  I need to start off pretty slow and five minutes a day seems to be enough to begin with today since I was in at work as well.  I've started off at the bottom two levels of resistance without any incline.  To start with, the aim is to use it to increase the walking type of activity that I am doing each day.  Though exaggerated, the elliptical is a more natural walking movement pattern than how I am walking at the moment.  It also seems to help loosen the muscles up to help get through the longer days.  I'm hoping that this is not just a result of the movement but a reflection of how the effects of exercise like this will now affect my overall health and wellbeing.  Pre-op, something like this would have me in pain that lasted for much longer than the amount of time that I had spent on it.  The difference between the grating that my hip joints used to do compared with how fluidly they move now. I still can't help be amazed.  I hope that I don't forget this feeling.

I'm hoping that within a few weeks, I have built to a half hour walk and my gait pattern and strength have improved enough to be using my cane all of the time (well at least for a couple weeks after that and then maybe not at all).