One of the interesting things about the recovery process is watching the data change on my Whoop strap. As many of you know, I have been a Whoop user since 2017. Over the years I have amassed a treasure trove of data. But I have never tracked it during a surgical intervention like this. Of course, I have never had surgery like this either. The data the Whoop provides has been invaluable to my progress as an athlete. One critical point is resting heart rate. In general, a lower resting heart rate indicates better fitness. A low resting heart rate indicates a strong heart muscle that can pump more blood with every beat, so it can beat less. Resting heart rate is measured at the end of your sleep cycle when your body is in its most restful state. Before surgery, my RHR was 45. In the month after surgery, it went to 54. In the second month, it went down to 51, and last week it went down to 50 with 4 days in a row under 50. This is the power of training and most particularly zone 2 training. Currently, I am doing 5 days of zone 2 work varying between 30 and 45 minutes using either the rower or the Echo bike. Without the data, I would not know any of this. How important are those 5 or 10 beats? I have no answer to that question, but I know that having a low resting heart rate is essential to cardiovascular health and thus, my overall health. When my RHR is consistently below 50 BPM I can begin to cut down the Zone 2 training and ramp up more high-intensity work. Having a low RHR allows my heart to be more efficient at higher rates. That’s a big win across the board. John Mariotti www.sunday-stories.blogspot.com  www.crossfitodyssey.com 775-338-2412

That’s right…exercise hygiene. What? Should exercise be like your other hygiene habits? Is exercise now a habit like brushing your teeth, showering, or changing your underwear? Speaking for myself, exercise is a habit. When I don’t exercise my day is incomplete. How would you feel if you didn’t brush your teeth today? What if you didn’t brush for a week? A month? A year? I suspect we all know people who have not moved with intention for a very long time. We are humans. We are designed to move. Ancient humans moved a lot. They didn’t need to set apart movement or exercise from the rest of their activities. Today we need to plan our movement. We have transitioned from lots of movement and physical exertion to minimizing our movement and avoiding physical exertion. This transition is being proven to be hazardous to our health. Although it may have increased our life span, the cost of not moving has far outweighed the benefits of modern comforts. Diabetes and obesity are rampant, immunocompromised conditions are common, and neurodegenerative diseases all compromise our quality of life as we age. One of the answers to solving this problem is exercise or intentional movement. Changing our attitudes toward exercise needs to shift from something we do when we have time or energy to something like brushing our teeth. This shift will increase your likely health span outcome. How are you going to create an environment where exercise becomes part and parcel of your existence? How will you ensure that movement is as important as eating is to your existence? This is going to require a shift in your thinking and a reordering of your priorities. Exercise or intentional movement needs to become part of your daily life. Movement is medicine.   John Mariotti www.sunday-stories.blogspot.com  www.crossfitodyssey.com     775-338-2412  

It’s that time of year when many of us turn a critical eye toward our nutrition. Let’s be honest, holidays are when it is too easy to self-indulge in all available food and drink. Normally you may not have a problem resisting temptation but often it’s too much. Your willpower is like a muscle. If you keep overusing it, eventually it will fail. The other day we were talking about calories and weight. It turns out that it takes 3500 calories to equal 1 pound of fat. So, if you eat 100 calories more than you need, or less than you need for 30 days you will gain or lose 1 pound of fat. It’s simple when you distill that down. Now you will need to be consistent over the 30 days. Most of us do very well during the week and not so well during the weekend. The not-so-good will wreck all the good you did during the week. The real problem? Where are these 100 calories to be added or lost? If you don’t know, that is the problem. You don’t know because you are not measuring and tracking your food and drink intake. How many calories are in the chicken wings I just ate? How many are there in that beer? If you don’t know there is no way you can eat more or less. It is that simple. The bottom line is this: If you aren’t measuring it, you can’t manage it. This is true of almost anything but especially food. Gain or lose, you must track and measure your intake. Anything less is a recipe for failure.   John Mariotti www.sunday-stories.blogspot.com www.crossfitodyssey.com 775-338-2412            

 This morning someone asked me what the recovery is for knee surgery of this nature. The answer is difficult. According to my doctor and all the literature the recovery to full range of motion is 6 months and 1 year to full 100% recovery.The problem with these numbers is they represent an average result over a large population. In other words, your results will vary! At this point, I am 6 weeks or so post-op. I have been probing the edges of what is possible. There is no blueprint for this process. I have restarted my 15-minute GoWod mobility work with some precautions (no 2 minutes in the bottom of a deep squat yet!). I’ve continued to do the prescribed exercises from the physical therapist. This is particularly important because those exercises have been proven to be beneficial. They are “low-hanging fruit.” Easy to do (for me), yet you can push into the pain cave on certain movements to continue to improve.According to my physical therapist, I am far ahead of anyone he has ever seen. Most people don’t have the desire to do more than get off the couch and go to the bathroom independently. I have a snowboarding trip scheduled for early March, just over 3 months post-op. Oh and don’t forget the CrossFit Open starts on February 27th. I have a 13-year streak I don’t want to break!Recovery, like many things, is determined by how hard you are willing to push, how much pain you can endure, and how badly you want to get back to 100%. All of that and not going too far over the edge that sets your progress back. This is where the rubber meets the road. Can you push to the limit and not fall off the edge? John Mariottiwww.sunday-styories.blogspot.comwww.crossfitodyssey.com775—338-2412  

 Sunday Story…The Knee revisited I am 31 days out from the knee replacement. The progress has been anything but linear. There have been days (few, admittedly) when it works better than ever and other days (less now) when it doesn’t work at all! Sleep has finally returned but it is still inconsistent. What has improved greatly is the range of motion. I have just now begun to be able to do Russian step-ups and squatting past parallel. The challenge is now in more dynamic movement…fast squats for example. The stretch reflex from the bottom of the squat is still quite painful. I still have kept most of the weight bearing off my right leg, although I have picked up some heavy weights (225# deadlift!) and 2x 88# kettlebells. I will start some lightly loaded leg work next week in addition to my physical therapy exercises and upper body work. I am just now shaking off the last of the anesthesia remnants. That was one of the more surprising side effects…how long it took for that to clear my system. And even now, 31 days later, my vital energy is still not where it was pre-surgery. The other truly odd thing is the numbness in the knee area. It’s hard to the touch but unfeeling. It was almost as if that part of my leg was disconnected from the rest of my body. The swelling continues to abate but it is still very prevalent. The other complaint is how much fatigue I have after limited effort. It is as if there just are no energy stores to draw upon. All in all, though, the recovery is going along very well. The physical therapist is amazed at the progress, but let’s be honest I may be more physical than 99.9% of his clients!!   John Mariotti www.crossfitodyssey.com www.sunday-stories.blogspot.com 775-338-2412

Taking a break from my writings on recovery to address the subject of resistance. Specifically, resistance to change. Human animals are built to find comfort and ease. That means change is not something to be embraced. We prefer the routine, the regular, the rudimentary. Change forces us out of our comfort zone, forces us to do things that we aren’t good at or don’t want to do, and forces us to confront the parts of our world that are hard and difficult. Rationally, we know change is good for us. But deep inside we resist doing anything that will upset the status quo. We see people around us engage in unhealthy behaviors. They know better. But the default is to keep doing what they are doing. Change is hard. You must want to change. I mean really want to change. It can’t just be a good idea or a thing to “try” out. You must find your “why” for the change. People don’t stop smoking because it’s bad for their health. Everyone already knows that. People stop smoking because their grandchild, in all their innocence, tells them they don’t like the way they smell. Change is spurred by emotion. When change is hard, emotion propels us past the hard part. Here is why you are reading this now: It is that time of year when we look back at what went right, and wrong and could be better for next year. This is going to require change! If you want the change to stick you need to be emotionally invested. You can’t just think it’s a good idea, you must have an emotional buy-in deep inside. Is this the year you (fill in the blank here)? You can’t begin without a compelling reason to make that change happen. If your why is powerful enough the how will take care of itself.   John Mariotti www.sunday-stories.blogspot.com www.crossfitodyssey.com 775-338-2412  

After my last message, when everything was going well, I may have gone over the edge. Monday, I had a great first PT session. Everything felt good, so I decided I should Ski erg for a bit. I couldn’t bike…, because the knee wouldn’t bend enough, so the ski seemed like the best choice. There is minimal flexion in the knees and lots of upper body work. So, 30 minutes sounds reasonable five days post-surgery, right? Wrong—bucko! Five or ten minutes would have been fine. Thirty minutes was a serious mistake. While I was doing it, everything felt great. Then disaster struck. My entire leg swelled up to an extremely painful size, and nothing seemed to help except lying down, feet straight up the wall, with the ice machine on the knee. Luckily, I didn’t do any permanent damage. By Saturday (today) the swelling had diminished, and the movement was much easier. This morning, I walked with the ruck crew for about 30 minutes, and it felt particularly good with no swelling. But I will still get upside down and get lots of ice along with my PT exercises. This is one of those times where more is not better. Backing off the edge has more benefits than getting too close and falling off. Finding that sweet spot is the challenge…where just enough is right but a little more is very wrong. Overall, a good week of recovery. Next week we will start poking along the edges again and see what is possible. Onward and upward!   John Mariotti www.crossfitodyssey.com www.sunday-stories.blogspot.com 775-338-2412