Personalizing Your Program

Just as you do with aerobic exercise and with your program as a whole, design your strength-training routine to meet your needs. When I set up my strength program, I had two broad goals: strengthening my hips and knees so that I could run, and building my upper body strength and endurance to help improve my golf game. I visit the university gym two days a week to work out, although I have an alternate home program for the days when I cannot get there. Because running is an endurance activity and because I have chronic knee problems, I use slightly lower resistance (about 60 percent) and more repetitions (two sets of 15 reps). I also do back stabilization and abdominal exercises daily. The only difficulty I have is controlling my competitive urges; if a young woman is before me on a machine, I find myself checking out how much weight she is lifting and comparing it to my own lifts. Luckily, I can control urges to try more, even if my ego wants to. If you are competitive, remind yourself that training should not be a competition.

A woman with whom I worked had a primary goal of decreasing her knee pain so that she could walk regularly. She does a home program using cuff weights three times weekly. Her routine includes single leg lifts, side leg lifts (abduction), and biceps curls. She does one set of 10 partial squats, followed by abdominal and back exercises. Once she reached a level at which she was not having knee pain, she maintained her program at that level rather than progressing it further. A young man I know of also likes to keep his strength program at home. He concentrates on abdominal work (200 sit-ups per day) and upper body work (100 push-ups each day, despite his shoulder arthritis).

Other people have told me they prefer a gym. One gentleman started out with some free weights and upper-body exercises at home. When he felt that his strength was adequate, he switched to a local facility. His program is simple "he does one set of 10 repetitions for each lift, performing most of the lifts that I suggested earlier. This type of program is short and easier to fit into a busy schedule.

Although some of you may feel that strength training is for athletes, I maintain that it is for all of us. Throughout this chapter I point out some of the ways that building muscular strength can help decrease the stress and pain of arthritis and enhance your ability to participate in the activities you enjoy. Use the information presented in this chapter to design your own resistance-training program.

The final component of an exercise program is flexibility, which I will discuss in detail in chapter 5. As I stated earlier, this topic is especially relevant to arthritis; one of the hallmarks of arthritis is the loss of one s flexibility and range of motion. You can decrease both of these problems by incorporating some very simple activities into your daily schedule.