Keeping Fit

[system 4-50]

A lot of us using boats are quite old.  There is a lot of information on here on keeping the boat in working order but less on keeping the crew in a good state.  Here are a few ideas that would have saved me trouble if I had heard them earlier. They are most male oriented because ...

1. BELTS  The things you use to hold your trousers up.  They are highly dangerous. When you bend down they can strain your innards into configurations they were never meant to have, and the result is a hernia. Henias can severely disturb your patterns of activity and the surgical solutions are never 100% satisfactory.  It took me 5 years to recover fully from mine.  When you're young, your innards can cope, as you age they can't, and they don't send you a warning email.  Take precautions before you get hit.

2. LIMITS  Touch something hot when you're young and you will snatch your hand away well before you burn (usually). In middle age you can take quite some heat before you move. In old age you can decide to stay in the kitchen well after you should have left.  This principle applies to all exertion.  In youth you will give up before the job's begun, and in old age you can go on lifting, pushing, shoving or whatever long after you are doing yourself damage, and that level is much less than you were able to withstand only a few years ago.  To stay good when old you must consciously monitor your level of effort all the time.  For me I feel the pain (and it can be substantial) after excess effort not at the time, but 2 days later.  At the time it does not hurt at all.

One particular aspect of this is eating and drinking hot stuff.  My mouth is able to take such stuff much hotter than my stomach.  I wonder how many people with stomach problems are just unconciously singeing their innards?

3. EXERCISE On a boat I find it quite easy to get not enough exercise.  On a cruise its ok but staying somewhere for a week it is easy to miss, particularly if there is a big boat-based task to do like painting or interior woodwork.  Ok, you do lots of work, but work is not necessarily exercise.  Now that I'm old, it takes only a couple of days before I start to lose capability.  It can be a shock when a one-mile walk is a major effort when you did it easily only a few days/weeks earlier. And it is so slow to get back.

4. BACKS  The reducing capability as you get older is not obvious (well at first) and backs are frequently where you get caught out.  Take great care of your back before you damage it and you will save yourself a lot of trouble.  There comes a point where you know you shouldn't pick up the grandchild but you still do.  Don't!

For me my troubles came when I fell over backwards just standing on my feet. It was my violent attempt to save myself that damaged my spine, not the fall itself.  When younger I would not have got even a bruise. I didn't know I had changed.  There are lots of opportunities on boats to damage backs - the simplest is stepping onto a step that isn't there.

5. DAMP  Damp is bad. As you get older, getting and staying wet for any length of time is bad as it promotes fungally types of afflictions and these, once got, are very hard to get rid of.  It just doesn't affect young people to anywhere near the same degree.  You need to know to avoid damp in middle/old age before you get hit.  If your used to being wet when young you may not see it coming.

 

Anybody got more ideas that might be worth being aware of?