I may regret asking for advice about this

[liv]

I want to do more exercise, but I'm not sure how I should go about it. Please, please read what I'm actually asking about before jumping in with advice.

There are several problems in the way of getting started with exercise. None of them is insurmountable, but I am hoping to find a form of exercise which at least minimizes them. Because the first problem is lack of motivation, which I don't think anyone can solve for me, but it ought to be possible to reduce the activation energy hump somewhat.

Problem 1: I'm asthmatic, I've been asthmatic most of my life. I don't in any way believe that people who have asthma can't do any exercise; I know plenty of asthmatic athletes and people with much worse asthma than me who keep in good shape. But the thing is that the kind of exercise everybody recommends you to do involves 20 minutes of continuous raised heartrate, and I simply don't know how to do vigorous, heartrate increasing exercise without getting out of breath. If I keep moving when out of breath, it triggers an asthma attack, it just does. There's got to be some way out of this catch-22, because otherwise nobody who has breathing problems would ever do exercise, but I'm utterly ignorant of what it might be. It's partly unfitness; the fact that I get out of breath just walking fast isn't asthma, it's me not doing as much exercise as I should. But I really have no idea how to start building up that fitness. It seems to me that even if I were fitter, the threshold for increasing my heartrate would just be higher, and I'd eventually reach it and then I'd have to stop due to not being able to breathe.

It may be psychological, this reaction. I spent so many years of my childhood associating not being able to breathe with panic, that it's hard to break that association. Maybe what I should do is convince myself (how?!) I'm not about to asphyxiate if I have to work hard to get oxygen to my muscles, and therefore be able to keep going. But to me a sustained rapid heartrate for 20 minutes sounds as unattainable as swimming the Channel or climbing Everest, I can't get my head round the advice that absolutely everybody should be able to do this easily. Another option is to use my medication more; say I start running and get out of breath, instead of stopping I could just take my reliever, and keep going? That sounds kinda scary to me, but perhaps it is in fact safe.

Does anyone have any actual knowledge of how this is supposed to work? I generally like people just bouncing ideas at me, but please don't in this case, I'm essentially asking for medical advice. If your answer is going to be, if you need medical advice, you should ask a professional, well, whom? I've tried asking GPs and practice nurses and all I get is the party line about how "everybody" can do 20 minutes three times a week, which doesn't help me with actual technique. I'm considering going to a more specialist asthma clinic, but I sort of feel a fraud, since my asthma is basically well managed as long as I stay fairly sedentary.

Problem 2: I have absolutely no interest in losing weight. Based on past experience as well as my knowledge of metabolism I think it's unlikely that I will lose much anyway, probably a few kilos and then plateau. And if I lose a few kilos, well, I'll be at the high end of overweight instead of the low end of obese, and everybody will still think I'm evil and disgusting and not capable of getting fit anyway. A lot of the possible sources of advice, and indeed institutions where I might try to do more exercise, are going to push weight loss quackery on me. Indeed, a lot of people seem to understand the question "how can I do more exercise" as a euphemistic way of asking for diet tips, or even worse, asking for reassurance that I'm pretty or suggestions for how to improve my dress in order to disguise the fact that I'm fat. This is not about weight and it's definitely not about appearance, and people trying to make me thinner and prettier and girlier, whether that's well-meaning friends or commercial businesses, is one of the big things that put me off getting started with exercise.

So, where can I get advice and support about exercise, and ideally find a formal programme, without it turning into a body-hatred fest? I don't actually mind if I do lose weight, though it'd be a nuisance for my wardrobe. But I don't want to think about it, and I don't want to be congratulated for it, and I don't want it to be a goal in any way. I guess my point is that if you believe that people who do the "right" amount of exercise automatically get the right body, then ok, that will happen.

Problem 3: I'm uncoordinated, and I also have a mental block about doing things I can't excel at. I'm not keen to do something where other people rely on me to be consistently competent, because I won't be. I can learn physical skills, but I need three times more practice than anyone else and I'll never really shine at them. I think at my age I can't really just turn up and do stuff badly for my own sake, even if psychologically I found that acceptable, because I actually will annoy people.

Problem 4: I need something I will realistically keep up with. This is the biggest sticking point, in some ways. Yes, I know, I am lazy, that's a big part of my problem here. I also do have a limited amount of free time. The point is that I need to do something that I'm going to enjoy, and which requires a fairly low barrier of preparation and hassle, because otherwise I'm going to just carry on what I have been doing for the last few years, and find sitting at the computer just so much more appealing than doing unpleasant and painful things that it will never happen. Stuff that can happen indoors is probably a bonus, because this is the worst possible time of year for starting anything that requires you to be outdoors. Plus, breathing air that's not much colder than about 20 °C makes triggering asthma attacks a lot less likely.

Does anyone have any suggestions that take into account problems 1 to 3? I'm probably asking in a really defensive way, but I'm rather afraid I'm just going to get lectures about how pathetic I am for not being more active. Or anecdotes about how totally easy it is to lose "loads" of weight if you're already thin to start off with and you perform the exactly correct magical rituals and hate yourself enough. Though hopefully not too many of the latter because most of the people who'll read this are people I have some connection to, not just random diet evangelists.

Possible ideas I've come up with myself:

• Hillwalking. I know I enjoy this, and it gets me out into the fresh air, and generally makes me feel really good about myself. I live right in the middle of some really beautiful countryside and I would like to take more advantage of it. I've already done a little bit of it this year (many thanks to syllopsium for encouragement and company!) The problem with this is that it's stamina and muscle-building exercise rather than cardiovascular exercise, and it needs a whole day at a time (so at best I'm going to do it a few times a month, not several times a week). And yeah, not the best thing to start on at the beginning of winter!
  
  
• More gentle walking. This is something I do already, and it tends to be mentioned prominently in patronizing leaflets about how easy it is for "everybody" to do adequate exercise. I already walk about a mile several days a week, and often longer (but gentle) walks at the weekends. The trouble is that I don't think it's really exercise unless you walk fast enough to increase your heartrate, and that cycles straight back to the asthma issue.
  
  
• Kayaking / canoeing. I really, really enjoy kayaking, and I'm actually surprisingly competent at it, and I seem to be capable of doing it fast enough to actually be valid exercise. The problem is that it's a huge hassle to organize because you have to find a club and travel to an appropriate body of water. Again, I can't really see it happening more than once a week, so it's not going to fulfil the regular requirement. And it's really not going to happen in winter!
  
  
• Swimming. I enjoy swimming, and it made me feel a lot better about myself during my PhD when I went swimming a couple of times a week. The thing is I don't think I actually have the technique to swim fast enough to raise my heartrate, so it ends up being stamina exercise rather than CV again. Perhaps I need to take some lessons! Also the problem with swimming is that getting to the pool, and bringing a costume and towel and having to wash and get changed and deal with my hair and come out into the cold air when I'm damp and tired forms enough of a barrier that I might not get started. I think if I got into the habit I probably would keep it up, though.
  
  
• Dancing. I enjoy dancing, and it's sociable, which would give me a good motivation to do it regularly rather than whenever I can make time (ie hardly ever). My generally lack of coordination is a bit of a problem with this, though. I think ceilidh-style would probably be ideal, because you don't have to join in every single dance and it doesn't matter if you're not the most skilled. But other sorts of country dancing clubs are a possibility, as long as they don't mind me being really incompetent.
  
  
• Pilates. I tried some in Sweden, because work provided classes and I could go along with colleagues, and there isn't such a big obsession with weight-loss or making your tummy flat as there seems to be over here. (Tried yoga too, and I hated it, so I'm definitely convinced that pilates is better for me. Also I find traditional "aerobics" unutterably boring, there's no way I'd keep up an exercise programme based on that kind of jumping about on the spot.)I particularly liked the version that has a big inflatable ball, because it's more of a game and it's a lot harder to cheat at the exercises. (I don't mean I would cheat deliberately, just that if you're supposed to do a difficult and painful stretch and hold a pose, it's very natural to modify it into something that's easier to hold, and the ball stops you from doing that.) There would be a huge advantage in having a regular class that would get me into a routine of attending, and again, it's indoors. The trouble is that again, I think it's probably more muscle toning exercise than cardiovascular, and also it's sometimes full of new age mumbo-jumbo (when it isn't being sold directly as a way to lose weight). The other thing is that some of it involves controlled breathing and I sometimes find it triggers panic / asthma if people tell me how to breathe. Plus I'm a bit scared of being incompetent and looking like a fool in front of the class. Maybe an alternative would be to get a DVD and do it at home, which would have the advantage of being easy and non-embarrassing, though I don't know whether I'd stick to it, or whether I'd actually learn enough from a DVD to do it correctly and get the benefit, without a teacher to show me.
  
  
• On the theme of exercise that I could do on my own, without having to make complicated arrangements or drag myself out of the house into the dark, unwelcoming night, I was thinking about gaming consoles that have a physical element. There's the WiiFit, but it's so centred around weight loss and self hatred that I'm not sure I could stand it. Or possibly some variation of Dance Dance Revolution, which I think I'd quite enjoy as long as I didn't have to do it in front of anyone else. The internet seems to think it's possible to rig up a version of it for PC, but perhaps it's worth getting a console for that purpose. (Which systems are in fact geared up for it? Last time I owned a console it was an early 90s era Gameboy, so I really have no idea what's on the market these days.) I generally like computer games, so it's plausible that that would provide enough motivation for me to do regular exercise.

So, any ideas? Please be a bit kind to me, I know I suck for having reached the age of 32 without figuring this out for myself, and for not having got over all the baggage I have from school PE classes, and for being generally too lazy to do what I know is good for me, but. Feeling guilty about not having started yet is not at all going to improve my chances of starting now, that much I'm sure of.

Comments

[vatine]

Hm. Well, you seem to have figured out (roughly) what I can contribute on your own.

If you're not incredibly horrified by the thought of weight-lifting (or using more modern machines) as a way to build muscles, that's possibly a route you may consider. More muscle mass means higher energy consumption at a given activity level. But, it doesn't do anything for "fitness" on its own (even if a hearty warm-up provides some aerobic exercise).

As far as games go, I've tried Just Dance for Wii and found it moderately enjoyable, in both a "coordinate" and "exercise" way. I understand that there is gaming controllers that are (essentially) an exercise bike, where the pedaling controls the throttle of the in-game vehicle (yes, the CyberBike for Wii and GameBike for PS3 and XBox360). DDR-alikes are certainly available on the PlayStation (and I guess, by extension, PS2 and PS3), no idea how that market segment is served by the XBox lineage.

[foxfirefey]

XBox just came out with the Kinect and Dance Central, which doesn't even require any controllers to work.

[wildeabandon]

Weight-lifting? Again, it's a muscle toning thing, but if you actually lift challenging, heavy, weights, it certainly will raise your heart beat, but because it does it for a short while, repeatedly, it might not leave you out of breath in the same way.

http://www.stumptuous.com/ has lots of advice aimed at women, and is better than most exercise sites about not talking much about weight loss.

[kake]

And if you decide to give this a go, there's lifting_heavy_things for advice and encouragement.

[mathcathy]

I'm quite interested in the idea of going out into the Peaks and joining in some orienteering days. It would probably have to be next summer now and isn't in any way going to fit the "regular" criteria, but we could look into doing that together because I reckon it can be taken at a pace that suits.

Or, and you would have to join the gym to make this work, a kind of buddying to get to the gym would do me well because I have completely lost the habit and I miss it. They have a giant pool, there are weight lifting classes, pilate classes and going together might just make it sociable enough to be both bearable and sustainable. And I can give you lifts, which would mitigate in someway against all the stuff you have to take if you go swimming/gyming.

[liv]

Oh, hello, I didn't know you had an account here. I would really love to go out into the Peaks with you, that would be super awesome. I don't really care if it's occasionally during the decent weather season, it's something I want to do for its own sake, not just cos it's good for me. I had dismissed orienteering as too competitive, but perhaps having an element of that would make it seem more like a game and less like a chore. I'm certainly happy to join you if you find something that isn't all iron man running up and down hills! Thanks so much for suggesting it.

Buddying could really help too. If I had a commitment to you I'd be a lot less likely to keep cancelling because I'd be too tired / busy. I'm not in principle against joining a gym, because, well, obviously the point of gyms is to provide exactly the sort of thing I want, namely instruction and equipment to help people do exercise! The main thing that's put me off has always been the advertising which says "join this gym, it will make you thin and beautiful!" Swimming I could certainly do, and I think what you're suggesting would definitely get me "over the hump". Other gym stuff I don't know, it's sort of filed in the boring and repetitive category in my head, but I'm certainly willing to try it and see if there's anything I find fun enough to carry on with. In fact, maybe you'd infect me with your virtuous ways and get me out to the gym really early in the morning before work!

[oursin]

Being lazy, I think it matters less what you do than how it fits in with your schedule and way of life without imposing huge amounts of inconvenience and stress. I therefore go to a gym which is pretty much on my way home from work - if I had to make a special expedition somewhere else I probably wouldn't go, or not with any regularity. I do weights and some cardio work, and the thing with cardio is that you can work up gently, rather than immediately start getting the heart hammering at maximum rate. And I do yoga because there is a lunchtime class at my workplace.

Another important thing for me is giving myself permission to be pretty crap at physical activities and telling myself I don't have to be good at it, the important thing is its being good for me. I am not going to press impressive amounts of weights for amazing numbers of reps or run a marathon or hold the Tree posture for more than 10 seconds without wavering. But that doesn't make the project not worth undertaking.

Skipping is said to be very good exercise.

[liv]

Thank you for such a sympathetic comment! You understand exactly what I'm asking for, which is something that I can fit into my life with minimal hassle, otherwise it won't happen at all. I do appreciate that you're not guilt tripping me for wanting this. Skipping sounds like a really good idea, cos I could do that at home and build up as gradually as I like... Thanks for the suggestion!

Giving myself permission to be crap is something I struggle with, definitely. Academically I'm an over-achiever (surprise, surprise), and even though I know intellectually that it's worth doing things that are good and fun even if you can't be the best, I have a hard time actually believing that.

[aphenine]

I have massive problems with being unfit. I'm too unfit for normal exercise and I had immense problems figuring out ways to get fit that didn't end up with me collapsing and being unable to catch my breath (I don't have asthma, I'm just that unfit) or that didn't involve me pulling something in a bad way. So I can sympathise.

I like the Wii Fit because, although it is a weight loss tool, it's main purpose deals with body balance, and training that up helped me increase my deep muscles (and incidentally improved my coordination). There's something inherently satisfying about standing properly and feeling that doing that alone is burning calories and taking strain off your back and knees. Also, I've recently found the free step function (you step on and off the board while watching some other channel on TV) pretty awesome for burning serious calories while doing something I would have done anyway. You can also compete against yourself in the exercises.

I also like Qi Gong, which is a moving meditation warm-up for Tai Chi. It's really easy to learn, can be done indoors and works by relaxing the body and mind while simultaneously getting the body ready for exercise through stretching and movements. It focuses heavily on the mind/body connection and on resetting it properly so that you're moving correctly and in harmony. Highly recommended for tense, stressed and uncoordinated people. It's also non-competitive and I learnt it from a DVD in my living room.

I've also done some Pilates and found that easy enough to do at home using instructional DVDs, although it's not my kind of thing.

[liv]

Thanks, this is very helpful, particularly because you're not already starting from so far ahead of where I am that I can't even imagine following your example. I liked the balance aspect of Pilates, definitely, so if that's included in the WiiFit exercises, I may like them more than I think I'm going to at the moment. I've heard that you can turn off the worst of the abusive stuff by telling it that you're ten feet tall so it congratulates you on your thinness.

[azurelunatic]

(I am another large woman who had responses suspiciously like asthma when vigorously exercising as a child, and my response to self-hatred stuff is hiding and then defriending the people encouraging it.) There's gentle walking interspersed with jogging for a few steps every now and then, to sneak in something more vigorous without causing a problem. The bit you mention, It seems to me that even if I were fitter, the threshold for increasing my heartrate would just be higher, and I'd eventually reach it and then I'd have to stop due to not being able to breathe -- it would be helpful if I could recall exactly where I read it, but I seem to recall reading something questioning the "sustained for 20 minutes" wisdom. If the "sustained" part being necessary to get cardiovascular exercise is in fact bullshit, then you might in fact be able to see cardiovascular improvement from twenty one-minute bursts throughout the day, or throughout a walk, or something like that. And increasing general fitness would of course cut down on the non-asthma-related breathlessness.

Possibly more useful than a nebulous goal of fitness might be a concrete "I want to be able to dance a whole set without feeling as if I am going to fall over", or "I want to be able to dance the whole evening without feeling as if I had been run over by a bus the next day" and work your way up to that.

The hot new exercise-is-a-side-effect-of-the-real-fun game is Dance Central for the Kinect: http://theferrett.dreamwidth.org/32376.html
http://theferrett.dreamwidth.org/34593.html
http://theferrett.dreamwidth.org/39428.html
The game system sounds expensive, but the game sounds fun, and not plagued with the same self-hate problems as the WiiFit; apparently one has to deliberately turn on workout mode.

There's what Dad calls "aerobic housecleaning" -- his favorite tends to be aerobic snow-shoveling.

I am totally not a doctor of any sort, but keeping going straight on through when you can't breathe really sounds like a bad idea. If you get symptoms that you know before the full-on stuff hits, would it be workable to back down until your system has calmed down (but not fully stop, say going back down to a gentle walk rather than stopping), and then once you've become comfortable again, dial up the intensity of whatever you're doing to just below the ZOMGFREAKOUT level? That sounds as if it's likely to increase cardiovascular endurance (as well as physical) and one hopes that it might also train away some of the panic as well.

YMMV, of course, and I hope some of this is actively helpful and none of it increases freakout.

(In the middle of typing this up, I got up and danced around my living room singing "Bad Romance", because the spirit moved me to; apparently talking about this stuff makes me more likely to actually do it.)

[liv]

Thank you, much appreciated. I'm sure that short bursts of vigorous exercise would be better than none at all, definitely. So yeah, bits of running during my normal walking routine could well help. And I like the idea of dialling back but continuing to move as a way of deconditioning myself from "breathless = asthma attack = panic".

I agree that concrete goals would be useful, and I was thinking that "beat my score at a physical game" would make a sensible goal. I am totally in love with the idea of Kinect as a piece of shiny tech, but I'm not sure I'm a serious enough gamer for the whole XBox concept.

[sea_bright]

Regarding the asthma, do you take your reliever inhaler before exercising? This is something I don't ever remember having recommended to me when I was growing up (or indeed since), but at some point in the last twenty years or so it does seem to have slipped into the official advice about reliever inhaler use. If you don't do this already, would it be worth trying to see if it increases the length of time you can exercise for without getting breathless?

On a more general note, I get the impression that an awful lot of people (including, apparently, members of medical professions) fail to appreciate how much variety there is in what triggers asthma attacks. There are people (me, for example) who have asthma which isn't triggered by being out of breath, and unfortunately this seems to lead to some people engaging in very poor reasoning along the lines of 'Well, X has asthma and can do Y, so anyone with asthma ought to be able to do that', when that blatantly isn't the case. I realize that just observing that this is the case doesn't help change it, though!

I may just be very ill-informed here, but I was under the impression that pretty much any sustained exercise would raise one's heart rate to some extent - I don't know how high it has to go for it to count as cardiovascular exercise, though. One thing that occurred to me is that it might be worth trying exercising while wearing a heart rate monitor (you can get them for about £20, or some gyms have them available for members to borrow). That way you could keep the exercise at the minimum intensity necessary for cardiovascular benefit, which might reduce the risk of getting out of breath.

On the subject of gyms, I don't know if the fact that they don't figure in your list above means you've ruled them out as impractical, but something I found during the brief period some years ago when I was a member of a gym is that there's a huge difference between the impact of the various cardiovascular machines they have. I found that I couldn't do more than about five minutes of sustained exercise on a stationary bike or rowing machine, but I could quite happily keep going for half an hour on a cross-trainer, while apparently (according to the read-outs on the machines, anyway) maintaining a similar level of exertion. So if you do try a gym at any point, it's worth experimenting until you find what works best for you.

Regarding game consoles, I haven't tried one in person, but the new Kinect thingy for XBox 360 appears to be an impressive piece of kit. I know that programs that include exercise are available (someone I know was involved in developing one), though I've no idea how it does on the weight loss/self hatred front.

[liv]

Thank you for this. I have never heard of taking a reliever before exercise; this is possibly connected to the fact that I haven't really done anything about asthma management since I was given the good drugs at age 12. With Salbutamol and Beclametasone, I barely notice I have asthma most of the time, so seeking medical advice is a really low priority. But in fact there has been a lot of research in the last 20 years, so it might well be a good idea to update myself. Good point that asthma takes lots of different forms, of course. I put that bit about asthmatic athletes in partly because I didn't want to come across as making excuses for my pathetic laziness.

It may well be that I'm over-ambitious about how much I need to raise my heartrate, and actually simply walking at normal pace is good for me. I don't know how to find out how much increased heartrate is desirable because every time I try to look this kind of thing up I get derailed by stupid weight loss advice. That's why I turned to my d-roll instead of just asking Uncle Google.

I'm not terribly keen on the idea of gyms, because they seem to be hassly (as in you have to go to a specific place and pay money and stuff), and often focused on weight loss, and quite likely to promote boring and repetitive exercise. However, the whole point of a gym is to help me with exactly the kind of thing I need help with, and now that mathcathy has offered to buddy me, I think I might be able to get over the activation energy and actually turn up at one. If I do start going to the gym I shall definitely try out lots of different things until I find something I like. Very good point about how tiring different things are. I know I am way better at, say, rowing than I am at running, and I don't think that's because rowing is inherently less effort.

[lethargic_man]

Possibly you no longer need this advice, with all the advice you've already got, but.

You say:

the thing is that the kind of exercise everybody recommends you to do involves 20 minutes of continuous raised heartrate, and I simply don't know how to do vigorous, heartrate increasing exercise without getting out of breath. If I keep moving when out of breath, it triggers an asthma attack, it just does. There's got to be some way out of this catch-22, because otherwise nobody who has breathing problems would ever do exercise, but I'm utterly ignorant of what it might be.

But then you also say:

I know plenty of asthmatic athletes and people with much worse asthma than me who keep in good shape.

So, maybe this is too obvious and you've already done it, but have you tried asking these asthmatic athletes how they do it?

[liv]

That's a pretty good idea. I think the main reason I haven't done it is because the people I know who have asthma but don't let it stop them are incredibly strong and fit and I don't feel I can even aspire to being like them. If someone has mild asthma and does moderate, not superhumanly impressive amounts of exercise, I quite likely don't know about it. So I'm partly hoping that some such people will come forward in response to this post!

[dpfesh]

I'm a fat grrl (and fine with it), i get varying levels of 'excerise induced asthma'.. and i'd much rather nap than work out, pfft. That being said:

I used to go to the local gym with hubs (he like..works out on purpose, daily. Weirdo) and we'd start off doing some ~sitting~ dumbbell exercises. Arm curls..uh..arm raises.. i dunno what all the names were, but the internets should have decent Dumbbell work outs.

Once my arms hated me, then i would treadmill-for-as-long-as-my-legs could handle it. Usually 20 min at a brisk-ish walk was my limit.

Then did some of the fancy machines (mostly back to dealing with arms).

I was able to bench about 120lbs at one point (go me!) and didn't lose much girth/weight, but i felt healthier and happier :D I would like to find time & money to get back to it. (I dunno, i prefer the nice gym environ..there's Air Conditioning or Heating..i'm not all distracted by other things in the house, etc..)

Dance Dance Revolution ZOMG - i *love* that game. Haven't played in forever since our Official Dance Pad (like the metal dance floor) broke. Funny, hubs is the one that broke it, lil tiny him just stompling like crazy.. But it's a great way to get points and get moving. ours was for PS2, you can get the official dance pads fairly decently priced on the internets (ebay even) - i'd much more recommend the official hard floors than the shitty foam pads. They slide around far too much. - I have noticed from other folks' wiifits that they are pretty..weight/size centric. Normally i don't care, but it even started grating on my nerves.

Good luck! If you go for some walks, enjoy the pretty outsides :D No feeling guilty! School is dumb and full of meanies. And you're allowed to take as long as you do to learn about anything. Have some fun with it.

[liv]

This is a really helpful comment, thank you, I feel as if you are coming from quite a similar perspective to me so it's really good to have some specific suggestions. Having someone to go with would be a good motivation, and it's a good point that once I'm in the gym I can't be distracted by something more fun.

Hm, I should try looking on eBay for PS2 and dance pads! Good to know that it's worth getting a solid official one and not a cheap knock-off. I think there's also a way to rig up a dance pad to be the controller for a normal game, so I can get exercise and play games I enjoy at the same time.

Thanks for the pep-talk too, that's just the sort of thing I need to hear.

[pj]

You have received wonderful advice already, but I just thought I'd throw in yoga. You can do it in your own home and it builds your core strength which could lead to other exercise you may like.

I think I would love "Dance, Dance, Revolution". *considers it* lol

I do not have the overweight problem you mentioned, but I do very much have the lazy factor, in spades. So, I got a yoga CD which is gentle and lovely, but made me feel as if I was *not* lazy. http://www.gaiam.com/product/am+pm+yoga+for+beginners+dvd.do?green=16790028273 And then I graduated to WiiFit Yoga which is much less annoying than I thought it would be.

I do have a contact on LJ with troublesome asthma I can direct to this post if you'd like? She is also a nursing student near graduation.

[liv]

Thanks! I didn't like yoga when I took a class in Sweden, but it's probably worth trying a few variants. And yeah, I like the idea of something that I could do just by watching a DVD and doing the exercises at home, I feel more likely to do that regularly than something that needs planning and getting myself to a gym.

[princess]

I feel terrible because I haven't actually read all the comments before contributing. I am only piping up to tell you something that I learned was true after my doctor told it to me and I tested it for myself.

Swimming can be beneficial for asthmatics. Something about the moisture in the air being easier to breathe or something, I don't actually remember the science of it, I just know that it was true in my case.

Also, to make it CV exercise, I bought one of those dorky kick board things and did some laps with that. It's actually a great deal of fun, and I can't ever get my arms and legs going together enough to do more than sort of drift across a pool, so this makes it "exercise" as opposed to something that feels like leisure.

Anyhow, if this was all useless, feel free to bin it!

[pj]

Ah! Another asthmatic on my list on LJ does swimming, also, because of a doctor's recommendation and it has worked out very well for her in building strength and energy. Of course, I believe she was a swimmer in high school, but still .....

[monanotlisa]

As always, you've given this quite a bit of thought, and valuable thought too. ;)

I used to do stamina or reaction sports when I still could; the elevated heart-rate seems to apply there - unless you kick it down a notch. Swimming, slow but steady, looks like the best candidate: in addition to training all your muscle groups, it'll protect your joints too (definitely a problem for me).

These days, knee-crippled and all, I of course do what we call Muskelsport - building up muscle by specific exercises in a gym. If you lower the bar - quite literally sometimes - you will find you don't get out of breath at all; in fact, for me, it's the norm these days. (Then again, as you know, I'm quite sporty and have been all my life.)

Personally, I'm one of those slightly stand-offish people who find Yoga and Pilates boring, but I hear such great things from friends more open-minded and, let's face it, less aggressive. *g* Definitely worth a try for others, I always feel.

[liv]

Ugh, it's a great shame that you are prevented from doing the exercise you have the motivation to do, when you're so athletic. Thanks for the suggestions, though. I am getting a lot of votes for swimming so I'm pretty certain I should give it a go.

[pensnest]

Hi.

In my experience it helps *enormously* to have someone to go to exercise with. Whether that means a friend who'll go for walks with you or someone you meet regularly at the gym or something else—just, having two of you to remember to go makes it vastly more likely that you will go.

As part of my gym routine I have three 10-minute sessions of aerobic work, all different. Ten minutes on the cross-trainer with *sprints*. This might be useful for you even in ordinary walking—do thirty seconds at a time of hard pace, then drop back to normal pace and 'sprint' again when you have your breath back in order. Apparently it's more effective than a longer period at a slower speed. As you get better at this, the normal pace will get quicker and the intervals between sprints will get shorter. (I've gone from panting through at 45 steps per minute to a regular 'base' speed of 60.) Then I have ten minutes on the rowing machine, and then another ten minutes on the cross trainer, but with differing levels of resistance—30" at a time, then up a level, for two minutes, then start again at the lowest level, maintaining the same speed.

In between the aerobic bits, there's Stuff With Weights. I've always been quite fond of weight training, and there are loads and loads of weights and resistance exercises available. I'd recommend going to a gym, though, and getting taught how to do them properly. Incidentally, I found that when I first started at the gym, I did lose a few pounds... and then those pounds quietly crept back, because I was building muscle.

My own routine is, gym (ie aerobic + weights) twice a week, and a Pilates class and a Body Balance class too. There used to be a very fun class that involved choreographed exercise, not *quite* dancing but not far off. And my gym offers Aquarobics, and fight-based exercise, and cycling, and even (apparently) pole dancing. So there'll probably be classes you enjoy, whatever your preference.

I'd definitely recommend, though, building your exercise times into your weekly timetable, unless you're incredibly good at self-discipline. And exercise with a friend—even if it just means, you go to the same class or you meet at the gym and exercise at the same time—is a really, really good idea.

Good luck!

[liv]

Wow, that's a lot of useful suggestions, thank you. It sounds like you're really amazingly fit and active! What you're describing sounds pretty scary to me, but it's reassuring that you can start with just a few short intervals of hard exercise and build up from there.

I think you're right that I need a buddy; mathcathy has offered to provide me with gym motivation, and I have a few friends who are willing to go walking with me. Plus a regular class is a lot more likely to be effective than just hoping I'll feel like and it have time, certainly.

[forestofglory]

I generally fail at exercise -- it is boring. I do walk around a lot.

Anyways I wanted to mention that I found the Ordinance survey maps inspiring in terms of walking around more. (I like maps) This might also work with a bike.

Also gardening can be exercise -- and tends to result in prettiness.

[liv]

Thanks, I'm glad I'm not the only one who finds exercise too boring to do as much as I should! I just bought a nice OS map of the area round here, which includes some really nice walking countryside within easy reach. I'm likely to do more of that when we get to the better weather again, but still, I think it's a very good idea. Yay for gardening too, I've never had a garden before and I'm enjoying the occasional bouts of weeding or planting. Again, more of a spring thing than something to get stuck into in December, but still.

[rmc28]

20 minutes 3x a week is quite outdated: it's 30 minutes of moderate exercise 5 times a week these days. I'm sure I remember being told this years ago, and it stuck with me because the person telling me said the change was because too many people interpreted 3x 20 minutes as being covered by having sex (!)

That link says "slightly out of breath"; other people have covered the idea of backing off whenever you worry about not being able to breathe. I would just like to add some anecdata: I trained for a powerwalking marathon in May this year and I didn't do it by getting regularly out of breath. My training was always at a level that had me breathing a bit faster/deeper than normal, rather than gasping for breath, and over time I walked further and faster. Also, while this was primarily a stamina exercise, I did find that my ability to run (e.g. after an abcsonding 3-year-old) improved tremendously over this time.

Walking, and then power-walking, was the easiest for me to fit into my existing commitments, because I could make it part of my commute, and do the longer training walks at weekends when I had childcare (i.e. my husband) on hand. But it's less enticing in the depths of winter. The WiiFit would be more fun; I don't use it that much at the moment, not sure if this is because I am getting my exercise elsewhere or just lazy (and I do hate its emphasis on weight). The hula exercise is entertainingly aerobic and silly, and I like all the core strength and balance exercises too.

I've also been working for some time on http://hundredpushups.com/ & http://twohundredsitups.com/ The idea being that the pressups will work my upper body and a bit of core strength, while the situps will also work the core as well as being a bit aerobic, which between them complement nicely the existing aerobic/leg exercise of walking 5 miles a day.

[liv]

Thanks for that article, that's helpful. The problem is that it also says that if you're obese you have to do 60 to 90 minutes of exercise every day. Because presumably fat people have a moral obligation to spend every spare minute of their life trying to get less fat. If I look at figures like that I just give up before I even start, I am not spending 10 hours a week doing things I find boring and unpleasant, just because my body is the wrong shape. It's not your fault at all that the NHS has a big thing about trying to get people like me to lose weight, I'm not annoyed at you for pointing to the article. But it's exactly this kind of thing that makes it hard for me to educate myself about how much exercise I should be doing; even official, reputable resources like that confuse the aim of being healthy with the aim of being thin.

But if I set that aside, ok, I'm aiming for 5 x 30 minutes, not 3 x 20. That still falls within the range that seems attainable, especially since the site says you're allowed to break it up into 10 minute chunks rather than it having to be continuous. A lot of the problem for me is that there isn't really any window between "slightly out of breath" and panic-inducingly unable to breathe. It's likely that if I were fitter I'd expand that window, but I don't know how to get fitter due to the breathing thing.

It's a good point that everything's connected, that if I improve my stamina it will also improve my ability to do intense exercise. If you can fit in marathon training around parenting a young child as well as working, I really ought to be able to find time! I could reasonably try walking to work, it's about 3 miles uphill, and wouldn't be a lot slower than the bus, which would make it very possible to fit into my schedule. But as you say it's really not enticing in winter. (Actually during this cold snap I've found I can't get my breath at all, let alone trying to do aerobic exercise outdoors.)

I'm sorry, I'm not trying to find fault with your advice, there's a lot in this comment that I find inspiring. I'm just really intimidated by how much effort and pain it would take to get myself to the point where I could start a programme that would eventually allow me to build up to being as active as you are.

[jenett]

Hi there - fellow asthmatic here, though my exercise stuff is currently sidelined for other reasons.

Some stuff that might help:

- Consider talking to your doctor about taking your inhaler before exercise. Some people it helps, some people it doesn't.

I don't like being that reliant on it, because it also messes with other things in my body (appetite, awakeness) for about four hours afterwards, and then I crash hard. Which complicates timing for other things in my life.

- Recommendations about exercise vary: a number of sources now suggest 30 minutes of movement most days, but not necessarily aiming at a specific heart rate (or range, more accurately) - in other words, 30 minutes of gentle walking has benefits, all by itself. (There are additional benefits if you get into specific heart rate ranges, or do weight lifting, or whatever, but you still get some fairly significant benefits just with movement.)

The intensity aim I've been told to aim at is "Can more or less carry on a conversation, but not sing" - if you can't talk at all, you're probably pushing beyond where your lungs are comfortable.

- Swimming works great for me. Water aerobics is a nice variation if you can find a class you like. (Some of the ones I've done have been tedious, but others have been great.) The thing I like about swimming is that I can push myself or take it easy, depending on how I feel.

(And yes, swimming lessons would give you more choices there... I find front crawl to be hardest on my lungs by far, so I do lots of breaststroke and sidestroke and a few laps on my back kicking, and so on, with only occasional bits of crawl when I want to push myself.)

- Dance meditation stuff also makes me happy - I'm fond of Gabrielle Roth's work on Sweat Your Prayers (book, she's also got videos out that will give you the idea, including via Netflix).

[liv]

Thank you, I really appreciate this detailed factual information (I know that's something you're good at, but thanks for giving me the benefit!) If I ask the doc specifically, "is it ok to take my inhaler before exercise?" rather than "how can I get fit even though I'm asthmatic?" I may get a better answer. I generally find that taking my reliever when I'm not actually wheezy can make my heart race, but only for a few minutes, I don't get the several hour lasting effects you're describing here.

It's true that some, gentle exercise has got to be better than none. A few people have pointed to evidence that exercise doesn't have to be intense to be useful, so that's a bit more reassuring. I think part of my problem is that I don't seem to have any window where I'm breathing hard but not absolutely out of breath and feeling as if I'm about to have an asthma attack. Talking but not singing just isn't a situation that exists for me; I'm either sedentary or walking slowly, in which case I feel absolutely fine, or I'm trying to do more than that and I'm on the point of hypoxic panic.

Thanks for the suggestions about swimming. It's definitely a good form of exercise for varying the pace. I'm not sure I'd like physical meditation, though; I'm not good at meditation in general, and mixing up prayer with exercise would feel weird to me. It's an interesting suggestion, though, and one I wouldn't have thought of!

[ephemera]

If it makes you feel any better, I'm 34 and still wrestling with the demons of secondary school PE and being 'allowed' to do physical things without it being about punishing myself for being fat etc ...

(Also asthmatic)

Things that have worked for me

- taking my reliever before exercise, it I think I'm likely to have an attack (cold weather, recent attacks etc) or during, if I think my chest is getting tight. For me 'lungs working hard' is a subtly different feeling to 'lungs frantically trying and failing to breathe'

- dancing - at clubs, and in class - Belly Dance in various forms is the best I've ever found for size acceptance, and for sneakily getting me to work up a sweat/use muscles I might not otherwise be using. (I tried and failed for years to learn from dvds, and found a live teacher invaluable)

- DDR for the PS2, and now the Wii - too much fun to feel like working out.

- WiiFit, which I keep meaning to write a post about, because I was really expecting it to drive me nuts from a 'why of course you want to loose weight, thin is THE THING' angle, but I've managed to use without it triggering my issues about that - you don't have to weigh in daily, for a start - just ignore that and collect time tokens. I do wish it had a 'set up a whole sequence of yoga moves' option, though, because you waste *forever* moving between individual moves, and I really *like* doing the yoga stuff with actual feedback which I have never managed to do from a dvd.

- Swimming. Total revelation 18 months ago that I am "allowed" to go swimming while a fat, and I love it. I just need my job to back the frack up so I can leave on time, so get to the pool before closing time. The warm moist air seems to help it not trigger my asthma, and if I plan my trips, I can go on my way home from work, which is so much more likely to actually happen than if I come home and have to go back out again. I do backstroke 'sprint' lengths when I want to amp the intensity.

- Walking, varying the pace - still getting back up to distance on this after fracturing my ankle, but there's walking, walking with a bit of pace to it, and then walking super-briskly-for-one-song-or-until-I-get-to-that-lampost, and alternating between them, until you get to a point where your normal and with-pace are almost the same thing. (The next logical step here is jogging, but I'm liable to re-fracture my foot doing that, so - not for me.)

Actually, when I fractured my ankle 18+ months back and was totally warned off any kind of impact exercise, I bought an elliptical machine, and I *really* need to get over my head squirrels and start back on that, but I'm currently allowing the practical issues (DIY and plumbing - yay!) stop me - I was at one point almost enjoying the time spent singing along to my MP3 player and elipticising.

Thinking about your final point, things that work for me are
- planning to reduce the friction stopping me - swimming on the way home, walking in the direction I would otherwise be getting a bus, leaving the DDR mats hooked up
- giving myself mental points for 'just doing three minutes' because once I've started I might, and often do, continue, and even if I don't I figure 3 mins is better than 0.
- for a while I was a member of a community called fanatacise, which may still be going, but you earned a point for 20+ mins of 'exercise' per day, to contribute to your team. I was never much on the 'winning for the team', but there was an accountability element of checking in that I had my 3 or 4 or 5 points for the day which helped me get in the habit of more regular activity. Nowadays, I miss it when I don't get my movement fix!

I should maybe stop rambling now...

[liv]

This is brilliant, thank you, I really appreciate the detailed advice from someone who gets where I'm coming from with this. That's really helpful advice about using inhalers in conjunction with exercise, thank you.

I think I probably would need a class for either dancing or yoga-type exercise. I'm not very good at following physical instructions at the best of times, so I'd need a teacher to give me feedback. Plus, if I made a commitment to a class there's a chance I'd actually get round to attending fairly regularly. I wonder if belly dancing is an option round here, I think that could well be a lot of fun!

Interesting that you find it possible to ignore the stupid body hatred stuff with Wii Fit. I'm leaning more towards at least looking into that option!

Swimming and walking with varied pace both sound quite doable. I think part of my problem is that the easiest exercise to do is running and I basically hate running. But brisk walking or even occasional bouts of power walking I can do, yay.

Very good points about reducing the friction. Those are great tips, thank you. And yeah, like a lot of chores, getting started can be the hardest part.

[wychwood]

I second everyone else's suggestions of buddies - it's such a big help with motivation having someone to go with, there's just no comparison. Also, swimming, which is awesome.

On the asthma thing - possibly I've just been enormously misled here, but in the past when I've used heart-rate monitors and so on, it has always seemed to me that the level of effort involved in reaching the "cardio training zone" or whatever was actually pretty small. This may be because I had a particularly poor fitness level, I don't know. But I can get to the "recommended" level with not-particularly-swift walking, or stair-climbing, or even just basic lengths swimming; my asthma doesn't get triggered by the sort of thing you're describing, so it may not be comparable, but I've never felt like I had to push anywhere near anything that might upset my lungs in order to get to the "correct" zone. If I'm right on this, then even your regular walking might count? You will know better than me how your heart-rate works out, though.

[liv]

Thank you, Wych. I'm beginning to think that my problem may be specifically running; if swimming or fast walking are good enough, the whole thing seems a lot less insurmountable than I was thinking. Especially if I can alternate more intense with gentler movement. Maybe I should get one of those heartrate monitors! Besides, having numbers to keep track of makes it feel more like a game :-)

[redbird]

Weight-lifting is more muscle-building than heart stuff, yes. But muscles and stamina also have their uses.

In fact, a question, since you didn't mention this explicitly: is your goal mainly/only to benefit your heart by raising your heart rate on a regular basis, or are you considering other health goals to go with that? My goals are stamina, strength, and balance, in no consistent order; the weights are relevant to the first two of those.

As far as I can tell, many people find weight-lifting boring. However, there's no way of knowing whether you'll be one of them unless you try it. I sit there and go "1, 2, 3..." and try to pay attention to form, and by all rights it ought to be boring, but it usually isn't. (And if you're on the borderline, music or audiobooks might make the time pass better.)

The other thing I remind myself of sometimes is that I don't have to do a lot: even a little is worthwhile. So, if I do a whopping three biceps curls, that's three more than if I stayed home, never mind that my goal is more than that. (If I was going to do 20 of something and a joint hurts after 12, I should stop, because those 12 were good but the next 8 wouldn't be.)

[liv]

I think my main goal is to improve my cardiovascular fitness, yeah. Partly because that's what I have a real problem with; I'm strong enough and have enough stamina to do most of the things I want to do, as long as they don't involve either moving fast or climbing steep hills. Partly because I have a strong family history of CV problems, heart attacks and strokes are pretty much what kills my relatives. The main reason is that I feel I can't really make any improvements in other areas, because, well, I get out of breath too easily to do the amount of drilling needed to learn to dance well, say, or to work on my strength by lifting weights, or even to improve my stamina for hiking or similar. Ideally I'd like to be regularly moving enough to protect my joints as well, but until I can sustain any kind of energetic movement, I can't really work on that.

Good point that a little exercise is better than none, thanks for reminding me of that.

[synecdochic]

fellow exercise-induced asthmatic here! Before my body started falling apart, swimming was absolutely my exercise of choice, especially if you're swimming at a pool that has a sparsely attended free swim so you can swim a lap at your own pace and then hang out at the end of the lane until you catch your breath. And yeah, the moist air really does help to prevent asthma issues, for me at least.

I'll second the many people who say that general toning does help my endurance as well -- when I'm regularly doing my yoga, or stretching, or even just using the wheelchair a lot (because man is that a fucking workout), I find that my endurance improves. So, really, anything you do will be beneficial, even if it doesn't hit the so-called "target heart rate" (which I think is such bullshit anyway).

One of my friends is having a lovely time with climbing -- bouldering, in particular, and not rope climbing. She is also incredibly uncoordinated and dyspraxic, and she's said that climbing is not only joyful to do (because it's a skill she has won through hard repetition and practice) but has helped her maintain her coordination elsewhere -- the skills convey. So, if there's a bouldering gym nearby, you might want to check out the disobey_gravity comm and see if there's any information in there that you find interesting!

My tl;dr, let me show you it

[rydra_wong]

One of my friends is having a lovely time with climbing

Oh hai, that would be me, I do believe. *g*

Yes -- bouldering made me into an exercise geek, after twenty years of avoiding all forms of physical activity (beyond some walking and the occasional bit of yoga) with fear and loathing. Suddenly I fell hopelessly in love with it.

I don't have to run anywhere or catch anything or be part of a team or a class, and it's completely changed my relationship to my body and my self-image. I've found I can actually learn movement skills and become stronger and more graceful and all sorts of things, and -- okay, I can babble about this ad nauseam, and have done so.

Anyway, climbing might not be your particular thing; something completely different might be.

But it's changed my life to discover that I -- geeky dyspraxic Bad At Sports Girl -- can live in my body like this.

(And I still think the target heart rate is bullshit, and I still don't ever do twenty minutes of sustained exercise at blah-di-blah. Or not consciously, at any rate.)

I think at my age I can't really just turn up and do stuff badly for my own sake, even if psychologically I found that acceptable

No, you really can! I have the honour of being semi-officially the second worst person they've ever had on the induction course at my climbing wall (the worst person refused to get on the wall at all) -- I got the staff to admit this many months later. I was 34 and dyspraxic and totally lacking in strength and so scared I shook continuously all through the two-hour course.

But I fell in love with climbing so hard; I decided I was going to be the worst climber ever, and I was at peace with that, because I enjoyed the movement so much. I went to the wall at off-peak times when I could have whole sections to myself, and danced on the walls where no-one could see.

And much to my surprise, I got better. A lot better. I'm now a decent intermediate level climber. I've done a bouldering competition. I even spent part of yesterday being filmed for some video for the climbing wall's website! (Which was a very silly and bizarre thing I'd never, ever have expected to end up doing.)

But none of that is the point, you know? The point is finding a way in which physical activity can be something that's mine, a way into ownership of and delight in my body, instead of the unpleasant humiliating alienating chore which society usually makes it.

[st_aurafina]

Exercise induced asthma is really common and the basic treatment is to use your reliever before you start exercising. It's one of the more common types of asthma in adults, it's a known form of asthma, and I'm really cranky that the medical professionals who was supposed to care for you are more obsessed with you being able to exercise for a set number of minutes per week, than they are at investigating the reasons that you don't find exercise comfortable.

Saying that everyone can can do twenty minutes of exercise three times per week is so hopelessly simplistic that I'm kind of weeping for them and their narrow minded view points. I'm sorry that you've been given one single party line and told to stick to it.

I'm a large person, and when I started exercising, I started with three minute bursts on an exercise bike. Without judging myself or comparing myself to others (I couldn't exercise with confidence until I was doing it by myself in my living room), I have been able to build that up slowly to 50 minutes a day. My exercise bike is strong, I feel safe on it, it monitors my heart rate and it tells me how far I've ridden, and how much energy I've burned. I found keeping a record, comparing my improvement over a matter of months much more motivating than comparing myself to the general population. (I like charts!)

I am physically uncoordinated - I have bad balance, I trip and stumble all the time. I use the wii fit yoga program to improve that, and I think it helps. I hate the wii board guy in the program, but I cover my eyes and sing a little song to myself while it does its little judgey thing. I'm over the maximum weight for the wii fit program anyway - I put a beach towel under the board to muddle the weight sensors. (The physical weight maximum for the board has been tested at 500 pounds - I weigh less than that so I'm not worried about breaking it.) The yoga program has been good for my balance, and also for my anti anxiety exercises to modify and slow my breathing.

I was surprised to find that when I'm not anxious, or feeling that the whole thing is hopeless, that I do actually enjoy exercise. It has benefits for my mental health, I think it has improved my balance, it's definitely reduced my back pain and increased my stamina. I did lose weight the more I exercised, but I'm not doing it for that reason.

almost GIP

[jesse_the_k]

I'm another asthmatic happily swimming in the pool. I've developed a routine with running & skiiing-in-place, stretches, noodles, balls as well as laps. Definitely not boring. Even on days when I have to use my rescue inhaler at home, and wear a mask to filter out smog en route to the pool, by the time I've done three laps (mostly underwater) I've changed how I exhale to this great slow rhythm that just stops the panic the fuck down.

It's taken years to get here — and that's OK. We don't expect to "get" all of fiction in a month or a year. One of the best decisions was to take a water-aerobics classic with a really kind and clever teacher. Spoke with her 1-to-1 beforehand, mentioned I was hoping to tailor the class to my capacity, if she had any ideas I'd love to hear them. A decade later, I worked with an exercise physiologist who had a submersible heart rate monitor! No estimating: this little doodad measured exactly how much CV work I was doing.

Also, truly lousy way to lose weight.

Here via a random content search, hope that's okay

[rydra_wong]

the thing is that the kind of exercise everybody recommends you to do involves 20 minutes of continuous raised heartrate

Just wanted to say: AFAIK, the idea that you have to have your heartrate in a certain zone, be breathing really hard, etc. for it to "count" as exercise is increasingly being discarded.

An example is the whole pedometer thing -- if you rack up 10,000 steps over the course of a day, you're doing great, and it doesn't matter what your heart rate was or wasn't doing or whether it was in 20-minute blocks -- that is cardiovascular exercise. You might get more of a bang for your buck if you ramp up the intensity, but you'll still get major health improvements at a gentler level.

And moving at "brisk walk" speed does count as significant, by anyone's standards; a rec I've often heard re: "sustained" exercise is that you shouldn't aim to be "out of breath", you should be able to carry on a conversation fine, just breathing slightly harder than normal. If you can hit that level, that's excellent.

Basically, forget the heartrate, do some walking or swimming and add a strength exercise like Pilates and/or weightlifting, and you'd be doing great.

And strength training is also great for overall health; there's more and more evidence that building some muscle does good things for all sorts of bodily systems (including the cardiovascular system).

I second the rec for lifting_heavy_things, which I love. You don't have to go to a gym to do weights work, btw; there's lots you can do just with bodyweight or a few cheap weights at home.

exercise_every_day is a nice comm for exercise logging and mutual encouragement (you don't have to exercise every day -- rest days are encouraged!).

Incidentally, both comms have a policy that any nutrition/diet/weight talk needs to go under a cut so it can be avoided, though in fact I've seen very little of it in either comm. I think DW comms seem to be pretty good on the body-acceptance and non-triggering front.

[nanaya]

Lots of good comments. I just wanted to say, don't be afraid to go to a specialist asthma clinic. They're there to help improve asthma generaly, not just deal with the most severe cases. They could probably provide a lot of useful tips, and could at least be a good way to monitor the impact of exercise on your breathing.

I *always* wanted Dance Dance Revolution...

[naath]

I very much doubt that "everybody" can do any such thing! However... I can do heart-rate-raising exercises without becoming noticeably out of breath, and I find that when I am fitter being out of breath requires more exercise than raising my heart rate. For instance cycling to work raises my heart rate (a bit) but doesn't make me out of breath at all (however cycling involves exercising in the COLD so I'm not suggesting it's great for you).

I joined a gym with a pool and gym equipment like treadmills and weights and stuff that you might want to play with - the gym advertising is all OMG WEIGHT LOSS but the actual gym staff are happy to answer questions of the form "how do I use this object?" without inserting unnecessary weight loss advice. Also I have been to some yoga classes which didn't include anything about weight loss, and the woo level was roughly "breath deeply and slowly to become calm". Of course individual gyms, and individual staff members will vary in their obnoxiousness (and your ability to ignore the crappy assvertising and mine may be different) :-( It may be worth noting however that typical gym use (for me) includes a)taking kit with me and changing and b)showering after which means (for me) that including swimming is no more faff or dampness than gym stuff in general.

The WiiFit stuff separates out the OMG U R FAT from the exercise part; the OMG U R FAT part is quite irritating but you can basically ignore it. Also it mostly say U R FAT not GET THIN NOW and, thanks Nintendo, I KNOW I am fat! It is indoors and in your own house where a)you probably are already and b)no-one else is watching both of which I feel are bonuses :-) And it has fun balance games which I get to pretend are "exercise" ;-p

I also rock-climb; which has downsides such as "needing someone to climb with" (this is an advantage on those "do I really wanna?" days because the someone else is relying on your presence) but is surprisingly accessible to people who are crap at the actual climbing part (you sucking at climbing will not your climbing partner's experience suck). Combination of strength stuff and balance; I'm not sure it's good aerobic exercise but it's a lot more fun than weight lifting in the gym and it certainly does get my heart rate up.

Exercise is very irritating in that it tends to take a long time to get good at anything. And even then I have to be resigned to the fact that I'm almost certainly NEVER going to be truly "good" at sports; however exercise also provides lots of smaller goals than "winning at the Olympics" such as "can climb stairs at work easily". It was certainly difficult to adjust my own success-metrics down from "hey this is easy I'll learn it fast" to "making any progress at all is good" :-( But setting small goals really helped.

Exercise you chose and want to do is a LOT more fun than school PE classes. Honest. I don't know what it is about school PE classes but they are absolutely the worst thing ever for getting people to develop a healthy exercising habit!

[rydra_wong]

Rock-climbing w00t! If you haven't already found it, there's a DW climbing comm at disobey_gravity.

I also rock-climb; which has downsides such as "needing someone to climb with"

Unless you go bouldering. Which is basically why I boulder -- that and not wanting to learn how to tie knots. *g*

I don't know what it is about school PE classes

I think it's the thing of being yelled at and forced into doing something you're terrible at, which makes you feel humiliated and awkward and scared, so you never have a chance to get better at it at your own pace, or to discover that you might be good at something completely different instead.

That's what it was for me, anyway ...