Exercising For Arthritis Sufferers

If you suffer from arthritis, you have yet another reason to work your workouts into your morning routine: Exercise, and stretching especially, can help alleviate stiffness in joints, which tend to tighten up as we sleep. I can vouch for this personally, as an old football injury has left me with a pretty nasty case of arthritis in my lower back that leaves me feeling about as mobile as a mannequin when I first roll out of bed. After several minutes of stretching, however (pulling my knees into my chest is especially effective), followed by some chin-ups and a quick aerobic workout on my rowing machine, I feel like a new guy.

Exercise can help soothe painful arthritic joints not only by “greasing” them with a natural lubricant known as synovial fluid, but by strengthening the muscles that support them, thereby protecting the joints by absorbing impact in ways that weaker muscles could not. “By strengthening the muscles around a joint,” says George E. Ehrlich, M.D.,

Director of the Division of Rheumatology at Hahnemann Hospital and Medical College in Philadelphia, “you not only help protect the joint, you allow it to function as it was designed,”

Check first with your doctor before you start exercising if your condition is serious. It’s going to be my guess, however, that you’ll be getting a green light, and a very enthusiastic one.

Early morning exercise is such a great eye-opener because it’s such a great artery-opener, providing your body’s cells with the oxygen and other vital nutrients they need to come to life after a night’s sleep. The lift that morning exercise gives you comes from the mood-boosting cocktail of endorphins, which can produce a first-grade “high” with no strings attached, except better health.

Even if your morning routine is just some jumping and light stretching in the shower, it’s going to make a noticeable difference in how you feel, mentally as well as physically ——— precisely the stuff of which career advancement is made, according to

Robert K. Cooper, author of Health and Fitness Excellence and The Performance Edge. For most of us in today’s hyper-automated world, “increasing our physical activity is the single most important thing we can do to improve the way we look, feel, think and perform,” according to Dr. Cooper. Better yet, it doesn’t take a lot of effort to bring these energizing changes into play.

So try to make at least some form of exercise a regular part of your morning routine. And if none of the workouts we`ve suggested seem to be your style, come up with one of your own. No one knows your schedule, your body, or your temperament better than you do, after all, so you be the fitness instructor. Be creative and be flexible, varying your activities as circumstances dictate, but always remembering that exercise is exercise whether it’s done in a sweat suit or your birthday suit, in a health club or on your bedroom floor. You’ll be burning calories and building health the same as any fitness guru with chrome bar-bells and a full-length mirror.