Dr. George L. Dixon - "Talking Fitness"

ARMS ARE FOR HUGGING

Do you deliver weak hugs? Sure, you can walk or jog at that amazing aerobic clip, and are proud. You don’t even need arms to do that. If you are hugging impaired, read on, to learn some upper extremity conditioning secrets.

This may or my not get you more hugs. It will certainly be agreeable to your huggee, if you don’t break anything vital with your new squeezing technique.

Strength training can be started and your arm vigor improved in an investment of only 15 minutes twice each week. Remember, you have almost all the arm muscle fibers with which you were born, but they have retreated into puny strands for want of work. Meanwhile you have been doing your aerobic exercise. (Good for you, keep it up!)

Here is a beginner hugger recipe. Hold 4+pounds (1/2 gallon of fluid) in each hand, at your side, palms forward. Raise these weights to your shoulders, slowly, as many times (2-12) as you can. One set will produce, over several weeks, 90% of the good effect that you desire, which is to get stronger.

Hold 2+ pounds in one hand, bend forward slightly, and put your arm straight, up and backward about as far as you can reach. Then bend tour elbow just a few inches and straighten it back out several times (2-10). Then do the other arm.

Put both hands straight out in front of you, shoulder high, palms facing. Make fists and face them toward one another. Rotate your fists and forearms around each other 10-20 times and then reverse. Do it again if you can, at least 10 times. Amazing how such a simple thing can remind your shoulders how they need to be used, isn’t it. (I learned this from Clare who now teaches her smiling techniques at 50 n’ Fit on Menaul).

Have a look at "Strong Women Stay Young" by Miriam Nelson, Ph.D., Bantam Doubleday 1998; or "Exercise a la Carte" by me.