EXERCISE QUESTION?

I have been doing walking and very light weights for the last 6 months. Now, I did not have any very noticeable joint pain that needed to be relieved, however, last week I started trying to ease into jogging. My knees don't like it from the look of it, hopefully that's something that will get better. Also, judging from an ache in my right shin, I wonder if I'm going to get shin splints. I had those when I was in high school and don't really want them again.

Biggest reason I'm concerned about shin splints and joints is not so much lyme but the fact that for the last few years I drank so much soda with caffeine....which is rumored to leach minerals out of your bones. I've cut it back to virtually nothing for the last 6 months, but I don't know if that's long enough to rebuild the damage.

Exercise is key to getting better from lyme. If you are just starting out, go slow. Do what you can, walking is great exercise to start, yoga. Light weights is also very good. It gets your heart pumping and in time will work to help you feel better, but beware that you may herx when you first start, but keep with it. Do whatever your body willl let you. Don't push too hard and work your way up. I used to exercise every day until I started getting from lyme. Then I ended up bedridden and couldn't even stand up let alone exercise. I started again very slow with walking 2 minutes a day. Yes, just 2 minutes as I was starting from scratch. I slowly worked my up to 20 minutes and weight lifting and then worked continued until I was running 3 miles every morning and spending 2 hours a day at the gym with a trainer and was in the best shape of my life. This was all in a 3 year time span, but I had to start out very slow and gradually work my way up and it def. helped me in getting well and was the key to my staying well.

Good luck.

Roughly, it works like this, and it's taken from this wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strength_training

Sets of one to five repetitions primarily develop strength, with less impact on muscle size and none on endurance.
Sets of six to twelve repetitions develop a balance of strength, muscle size and endurance.
Sets of thirteen to twenty repetitions develop endurance, with some increases to muscle size and limited impact on strength.
Sets of more than twenty repetitions are considered to be focused on aerobic exercise. They do still use the anaerobic system, but usually at a rate through which it can consistently remove the lactic acid generated from it.

The idea is, you will use a weight that will cause you to come close to failing by the last repetition(but not actually failing). Of course, if you are only doing 5 reps, that will be a higher weight than if you are doing 12. Best way to find out is to just pick a weight, do it, and if it wasn't enough, then on your next session increase it until you find the right weight.

Now, "light weight" means different things to different people. Doing 12 rep weight might be considered light weight, if you are comparing to 5 rep weights. On the other hand, some people who only want to do that minimum amount of weight training they can, might use a weight that is intentionally lighter than they could otherwise do, in order to have a very low impact workout, but still get a small benefit.

In my case, I've been doing 1 set of 8, using 24 pound dumbbells, doing about 8 different exercises, about 3 days a week. I've been acclimated to that weight for months, if I had wanted to train harder, I could have added a couple of pounds 3 months ago and by now there's a good chance I'd have worked up to 34 or 39 pounds. I do plan to do that in the future but I'm taking it extremely slowly while I still consider this to be lyme "rehab". By the same token that's why I waited 6 full months of walking before jogging and even now, I'm basically alternating between jogging and walking laps to keep the intensity down. That might sound like a choice, but it's not really, as I am currently incapable of jogging more than a half mile at once anyway.

I haven't been on any medication in a very long time, only herbs and stuff like alpha lipoic acid. I'm thinking that eventually, I might see if I could do a month of something like doxycycline as a sort of coup de grâce, but I moved and there's only regular doctors around here, so that means I'm going to have to think hard about how I'll convince a regular doctor to prescribe an antibiotic.