Cardiac Rehab Exercise

The final stages of my rehab program have come in to play. I’m now attending a Cardiac Rehab Exercise class at the hospital.
It’s a series of 12 sessions aimed to teach you how to exercise correctly following a heart attack.

The process is like a circuit training session on sedation.

The first session was strange. A class of 12 or so middle to older aged people all shuffling about for the 15 minutes graded warm up.

The warm up, it’s explained, is to slowly get your body and heart ready for some moderate exercise that follows. The warm up is less strenuous than walking into the hospital, but it’s using each muscle and gradually building up to make you ready for the circuit that follows.

The circuit is a series of cardiovascular based exercises, that takes about 30mins to complete. While doing the circuit you push a little to begin to deepen your breathing, with an aim to reach a moderate breathing level. One where you can still hold a conversation without gasping. It’s all measured on the Borg scale. A scale introduced by Gunnar Borg that rates from 0 to 10 (o being nothing at all and 10 being extremely hard) We have to aim for 3 4 or 5 (moderate).
The circuit is followed by a 10 minute structured cool down. The warm up in reverse.

And then it’s tea and biscuits.

You have your blood pressure and heart rate read before and after the session.

Having been a fairly fit person all my life I’m finding it difficult to adjust to this very sedate process, but I’m doing as told.

Once the session is complete I can go off to a normal gym and start to build up my fitness program.  My aim is to become fit enough to climb mountains again.  I really want to revisit Striding Edge, but for now I’ll have to stick with places like Millstone Edge (that’s where the photo above was taken yesterday)