Health and Fitness: Ask Ingrid
We have a question this time that I have covered partly before. It addresses some common problems around body shape, general levels of wellness and side effects, and I will do my best to answer this complex question.
Q: I have been positive for 16+ years and I have lipoatrophy and lipohypertrophy. I am on Nandrolene steroids (one per week) and half way through Sculptra treatment. Besides walking, what exercises would you recommend to try and even out my weight? I have limited access to gym or equipment. I have a protruding stomach, no butt and my arms and legs are thin. I’m not looking for a miracle. I just want to know I am doing all I can to help.
Well, that’s a great question - and the right attitude to go with it. I can help but, as you suspect, there is no miracle answer.
Walking is great for keeping you fit, but it won’t do much for your thin arms and legs, or your butt and stomach. To make the best use of the steroids that you are on, you really need to do some resistance exercises (weights or gym machines or body weight exercises). This sort of exercise will help build up your arms, chest, legs and butt, making them bigger, and it’s also important to firm your stomach so it will not look as big.
So I would advise two to three sessions per week of strength and muscle toning exercises for your arms, legs, shoulders, chest and back. These are exercises like lunges onto a step, side pushups, reverse flys and arm curls. This type of training and sample exercises, which you can do at home without much equipment is covered in the Talkabout issues listed further on in this column.
You need to do resistance exercises for your stomach, but also for both layers of your torso, both the deeper abdominal muscles that hold everything in and stop your stomach protruding and the surface muscles that flatten your stomach.
These exercises for the deeper layer are some times called core stability training and are exercises like dead bugs and crunches on the ball. The surface muscles are exorcised when you do the various crunches etc that you see in all the fitness magazines. If you don’t have assess to gym or equipment there are still body weight exercises and home made weights that you can use to achieve results. Though even going to the gym or somewhere that has equipment once a week and doing some exercises for arms, legs, chest and back would be worth it. Doing some more intense muscle-building exercises would get results quickly.
If you want a place to start off at do five minutes of exercises for your upper body, five minutes of exercises for your legs and butt and then a few minutes of stomach and lower back exercises, then finish off with a minute or two of core stability exercises.
I have covered some of this in previous Talkabouts, so get on the net or ring the PLWHA office and request the issues that look relevant. Issue 134 August-September 2004 has pictures and exercises to get you started. Issue135 October- November 2004 is about working out which exercises are for which problems areas. Talkabout issue136 Dec-Jan 2004\2005 contains pictures and exercises to combat muscle wasting. Talkabout issue137 Feb-Mar 2005 contains information on how to workout how much and when, and it has basic programming ideas. Issue 138 Apr- May 2005 contains more pictures of exercises to help you target specific muscles. Issue 141 Oct- Nov 2005 and 145 Jun- Jul 2006 contain more exercise pictures and ideas to vary your fitness program. If you read these articles and start doing some of the exercises this will bring you up to speed on the subject very quickly. After reading about the exercises in Talkabout gradually do more repetitions, as you get stronger, or try the harder exercises. There are several articles which describe how to make progress while exercising at home. So have some fun trying out some of the exercises in previous issues or see what fitness info is available to you through your social contacts, neighborhood centre or healthcare practitioner.