It has been a while since I recorded an exercise session.

At the beginning of August I was admitted to hospital with atrial flutter. Exercise rather abruptly stopped being something I was building on and became something I needed to leave alone for a while.

My Strength & Health Log stopped too.

I didn’t even draw up the pages.

The notebook simply remained blank.

After weeks of carefully ruling pages, recording dialysis, meals, medications, steps, exercises and a Win of the Day, there is something quite striking about that empty space. I could have continued filling it with records of what I wasn’t doing, but I didn’t particularly need a notebook to tell me that I was recovering from a hospital admission.

So I left it alone.

This week, however, I began exercising again.

Thursday: Five at a Time

On Thursday 20 August, I picked up my dumbbell again.

It was loaded with 1.75 kg of plates at each end — 3.5 kg of plates in total, plus the weight of the dumbbell itself.

I wasn’t interested in discovering how much I could manage or trying to return immediately to where I had been before hospital.

I simply did two sets of five hammer curls.

Hammer curls: 2 × 5, with 1.75 kg at each end of the dumbbell.

That was enough.

Those ten repetitions were my first deliberate resistance exercise since the hospital admission.

Before August, ten hammer curls would hardly have merited a second thought. I had been doing sets of curls, squats, incline push-ups and doorway pulls as part of an increasingly established routine.

After an admission with atrial flutter, ten repetitions meant something rather different.

They meant I had started again.

Sunday: Back to Tens

Today, Sunday 23 August, I picked up the dumbbell again.

This time I managed:

Hammer curls: 2 × 10, with 1.75 kg at each end

Bicep curls: 2 × 10, with 1.75 kg at each end

The weight stayed the same. The hammer-curl repetitions doubled, and I added two sets of bicep curls.

It is still a small amount of exercise compared with what I was doing before hospital, but comparing myself with July isn’t particularly helpful at the moment.

July belonged to July.

August brought something different.

Exercise Had Become Part of Everyday Life

Before the hospital admission, I had developed a habit of what I came to call “snacking” on exercise.

Exercise wasn’t necessarily a single workout at a particular time of day. I might pass a doorway and do ten assisted pulls. A suitable horizontal rail could prompt a set of incline push-ups. On more than one occasion, an otherwise uneventful journey in a lift provided the opportunity for a few weighted incline push-ups with my day pack on my back.

At home there were squats, goblet squats, bicep curls and hammer curls.

Alongside that was the walking. During July there were weeks when I averaged well over 10,000 steps a day, including one week averaging more than 15,000.

Movement had gradually become woven into ordinary life.

Then my health changed.

There wasn’t a gradual reduction in training or a carefully planned recovery week. There was a hospital admission, cardiac monitoring, new medication and a new diagnosis.

Exercise stopped.

Leaving the Pages Blank

The Strength & Health Log had become an important part of my routine. I had developed different layouts for dialysis and non-dialysis days. There were spaces for energy, steps, meals, medications, exercise and dialysis information. I recorded personal milestones and blood results. Each day ended with a space for a Win of the Day.

Then August happened.

For a while I didn’t even have the inclination to draw the next week’s pages.

So there is a gap.

I think I am going to leave it that way.

There is no need to reconstruct August afterwards. I don’t need to rule up empty pages and carefully document all the exercises I didn’t do.

The absence is itself part of the record.

My body had other work to do.

Beginning Again

There is a temptation after illness to measure recovery by how quickly we can return to whatever we were doing before.

I’m trying not to do that.

The body that came home from hospital doesn’t owe the body of July anything.

For now, five repetitions becoming ten is progress.

Picking up the dumbbell again is progress.

Stopping when I’ve done what I intended is progress too.

And perhaps one of the lessons of keeping this journal has been learning that health cannot always be represented by an upward line.

Sometimes the record contains new milestones.

Sometimes it contains extraordinary numbers of steps.

Sometimes it records dialysis, tiredness, cramps or a difficult day.

And sometimes there is simply a blank space.

The Strength & Health Log can begin again properly in September.

For now, I don’t need boxes and statistics to tell me that something has changed.

On Thursday I managed five repetitions at a time.

Today I managed ten.

That’s enough of a record for August.

September can have a fresh page.