Exercise Log: Around the block

[cjsmith]

Rob goaded me. It's not my fault. He wanted to go for a walk while it was nice out.

So I went down the driveway (DOWN!! wheeeee!), with Rob walking alongside me. We turned left and kept taking left turns until we got back home. This is about a third of a mile, I remember from my running days, and I had to stop and rest several times. One of those times I found a cute kitty to scritch. :-)

I never realized before, even when running, that the sidewalk is tilted toward the street. I suppose that makes sense for drainage. I also noticed for the first time that some corners have no curb-cuts for getting on and off the sidewalk. If I ever wheel down the main street near my house for any distance, crossing side streets will mean taking detours down those side streets to use people's driveways. This presumes of course that the driveway owners haven't parked a large pickup truck out across the sidewalk or something like that. (That part isn't theoretical. I earned my halo for today by failing to collide with some guy's truck. I'm sure the fact that there was JUST enough room for a wheelchair on each side -- so I could get off the sidewalk, around the truck's ass end, and back on the sidewalk again -- was very deliberately planned by the owner. I'm positive. He even judged my skill level perfectly.)

I'm trying to figure out which muscles get used when I'm propelling the wheelchair. Biceps, for sure, a bit of deltoid, all the gripping muscles in the hand, and then I get puzzled. There's whatever goes from the outside edge of the elbow to the thumb side of the wrist, and there's SOMEthing in the upper back but that doesn't make sense to me yet.

Comments

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

Our neighborhood doesn't have curb cuts on any of the (safer) back streets to my house, and the sloped curb up to the driveways has a deep enough angle that I bottom out. It's amazing how obvious things like that become when it's necessary.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was in the street for a while to get the opposite camber, and then when I needed to get back up on the sidewalk I tried to use the closest driveway but it was too deeply angled. My wheels would catch air and spin. Rob had to haul me up.

[lkeele.livejournal.com]

Good for Rob! Stupid truck guy.

Yes, you're working your biceps, and your hand muscles -- but also your forearms (your brachioradialis), and your triceps (on opposite side from your biceps). You're probably working your deltoids (shoulders), and I'd be surprised if it wasn't give your lats (latissimus dorsii -- the triangle shaped muscle on your mid-back) and your traps (trapezius -- the muscles that sort of go between the shoulder and the neck, if that makes sense)a good workout.

Do you pull the wheel towards you or push it away from you? I'm thinking push, in which case it's getting your lats and traps and triceps more than your biceps and deltoids. But it's a good upper-body workout, that's to be sure!

[genderfur.livejournal.com]

Push to go forward; pull to go backward.

Yes, asshole people park across the sidewalk all the time. It's not just you they hate, it's also every small child who shouldn't have to step out into the street, and people walking dogs, too.

What's the rule about curb cuts, anyway? Only required in biz districts? I know there's *some* level of rule about them.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I might ask some town official about where they put curb cuts and where they don't. I can imagine that the lack of curb cuts in my neighborhood is going to get annoying mighty quick. It might even be that they don't bother with 'em unless someone needs 'em. (Nah, that'd make too much sense.)

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

In many cases in residential areas, they're put in with any changes. Right now, near my house there are a bunch of condos being built (our house/land will become condos, too) and between now and 2007, the road will be widened. At that point, there will be curb cuts. Or if the sidewalk is damaged anyhow, when they replace the concrete, they'll add a cut.

Regarding the trucks in driveways: I've had to turn around and go back half a block (or more, if I want to cross at an actual corner) to get to where I need to be. Near my house, there's one corner (with cuts, probably because it's near a school) where the only safe crossing, only light/crosswalk, is on the north side of the intersection. The south side has no crossing. A moving van was in a driveway such that I had less than a scooter-width on the side I needed to go around him on, but about a car-width on the other side. It's a wide driveway. Grrrrrrrrr. I ended up leaning waaaay over to the right, squeezing my front wheel into the gap and letting the back end of the truck go over my arm rest, then I bumped my right rear wheel down a couple of inches because I couldn't quite get to the whole sloped area, but I made it. The option was to go a couple of hundred feet back, cross in the middle of the block, go down that sidewalk, cross back to the north at the crosswalk, cross to the east the street I needed to cross, then cross to the south again, a zigzag. A power chair or four-wheeled scooter couldn't have made it through the gap.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Oh yowza. How annoying! I can even understand that a moving van just about has to park in the driveway. It doesn't make sense for it to sit in the street and have all the heavy stuff carried twice as far. But that doesn't help those of us with wheels on.

I'd probably be less annoyed if I had a powered chair or scooter. I'm not quite ready to buy one yet, 'cause I'm half afraid if I ever get in it it'll be so nice I'll never get out, but I've got the idea in the back of my mind.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Unless I'm going backward I don't see how I'm using my triceps or my lats and traps. I need to think about the motion more. I grab the wheel at a point behind me, and pull forward (biceps, deltoid, that forearm one) until my hand is a bit ahead of me. I don't see how constriction of the traps or lats help that motion. HOWEVER, my traps are tight afterward, so I'm doing something with them. Maybe I'm hunching my shoulders up as part of the arm-swing. Nobody said I have to be doing this efficiently. :-)