The Benefits of Exercise?

When you play sports and run have you ever experienced chest pains or dizziness?,” the doctor asks my 14 year old son. He is getting his annual physical and the question is routine. Danny answers: No.
The area where my shoulder and arm meet has been hurting all morning and I haven’t thought much of it until the doctor asks the question and then for a brief second I get real nervous. The doctor has moved to swine flu and that calms me down. They physical continues. Danny gets a clean bill of health.

It was worse during my older son’s recent trip to the doctor a few weeks back. His blood pressure is a little high for someone his age so the doctor spent a lot time making sure he wasn’t experiencing any chest pains or fatigue. As he asked my son some follow up questions and discussed how blood moves through the body and heart, the pain in the same area of my chest seemed to get worse. After about 30 seconds, I started to sweat a little. Anxiety set in. Luckily, the doctor started talking about something else and my panic and pain passed.

A couple weeks after my older son’s doctor visit I was sitting at my desk shortly after I arrived at work and was pretty sore in the same area. A few minutes later in a meeting, the soreness returned and for a moment so did the panic. Luckily, the meeting was pretty interesting and my mind drifted away from the pain and back to the subject at hand. I was worried somebody had noticed.

Finishing up my work out on the elliptical machine at the YMCA, I looked at the results. I had gone for 60 minutes, covered 4 miles and burned more than 600 calories. My average heart rate was 146. My peak rate was a little over 170. I smiled. A couple months earlier I had noticed that I had become a little lax about my exercise routine. I was putting in about an hour four or five times a week, but I wasn’t pushing myself. On the elliptical machine I was never going more than three miles and rarely getting my heart rate above 140. My weight lifting routine had shortened. I wasn’t lifting enough weight and was skipping or eliminating some of the more difficult exercises, especially for the shoulders, arm and chest.

The only downside to this new routine is I’m working all my muscles a lot harder and feeling sore. Of course the pain in my legs, stomach or back doesn’t ever trigger panic. But as I describe above, sometimes any soreness or twinge in my chest makes me worry something more dangerous is happening to my 46 year old body. That more exercise sometimes makes me worry or even panic about my immortality seems ironic. For the first time in life, chest pain can cause extreme anxiety. Five years ago a hard workout and some soreness in the chest was just that.

Let me know what you think.