Greg's Running Blog

It’s not really the strength exercise that I wanted to write about, it’s more about my father and my concerns. He has a bad back.He has had a bad back for as long as I remember. He built our house with his own two hands and lifted way too much building material for way too long. He has also worked underground in pressure environment (caisson) which I’m sure wasn’t good for his health. He has spent the last 4 days in hospital where they have ran some experiments, tests and MRIs on his back. The consensus is that one of his lumbar discs is severely degenerated and his cervical vertebrae have all kinds of bone growth on them that are going to impinge on nerves eventually. They said surgery is not advised at the moment but they will keep an eye on it.

I had a video chat with my dad today and we were talking about my weight loss and how he could stand to lose 30 lbs himself. Then I tried to tell him about how he should eat healthier, and probably do some basic strength exercise. I’m supposed to put together a simple non-boring nutritional plan for him that he and his wife can follow that would help him lose weight. Simple yet non-boring is going to be a challenge in itself. I also told him that he should probably do some strength training to keep and build muscle. I told him push-ups would probably work for him pretty good. And I told him that he’s probably pretty wimpy right now and start easy with the push-ups. Then he told me that he’s probably good for 20 push-ups. At this point I told him that there is no way he can do more than 15 good form real push-ups. I also told him that even I, who has been training for the past 3 months can only do about 28 of them and I have started at 12 push-ups when I first gave it a shot 2 months ago.

So We had a push-up contest over Skype. I managed to do 30 of them and I probably could have done 2-3 more if I really wanted to but the form would have gone downhill. Then he got down on all fours and managed to do 10. I felt pretty bad. There was my dad with a broken back doing push-ups for me just to prove me wrong. It was silly. He did manage 10 of them and then he called it quits. He said he could have done more but didn’t want to hurt his back. His form wasn’t pretty and I though he probably struggled with it. But he’s 56 and not in the best shape as you understand by now. I just hope I didn’t make him injure himself. But he’s talking about going skiing in 2 weeks which might be nuts with his back but I can’t stop him.

Maybe I’m overreacting and I’m overly concerned about my dad’s back and the doctors are right by telling him that it’s not that bad and he can exercise and go skiing. But he’s my only dad and I want to make sure that he will walk for a long long time.

Push-ups

• 1×30 at BW