As part of trying to improve the quality of my sleep, I try not to use a screen immediately before bed, other than to flick the meditation app on.
Which led to me joining the library and getting out a real book.
I hit a problem on the first night, my thumb muscles started feeling fatigued 😳
In my defence, it was a pretty thick hard back book and I also dislocated a thumb at the end of February and I’m still rehabbing it.
However, it was a good reminder that fitness is very specific to what you train for. Still embarrassing that reading a book highlighted a weakness not grappling my 130kg training partner at Jiu Jitsu.
I’m now nearing the end of the book and can confirm that over the past few weeks of real book reading I have built up thumb endurance.
All activities can be trained for; climbing, scrambling and hiking in the North Wales mountains last Monday caused me no issues at the time, just sore legs for a few days afterwards.
It’s hard to train for something you don’t know will cause a problem though, who’d have thought reading a book would need training for?
As we get older, having a good all round level of fitness is important, especially being strong.
Being stronger gives you more confidence in day to day tasks from carry your shopping to picking up your kids and grandkids to driving a ball of the tee.
If you don’t know where to start, let us know and we can guide you.
Darren “👍” Checkley
