I play DDR at home (all you need is a DDR pad and a computer). It solves all the problems except the sweat. But since it’s at home, I would think you wouldn’t mind that as much (plus you can have a towel nearby). I find this the most convenient exercise ever, since I can do it at home, any time, and for free.
I once owned a DDR pad, but either it or the adapter I used to hook it up to my computer had a delay that made it unplayable. So I don’t have one anymore, and this therefore fails the expense criterion.
But since it’s at home, I would think you wouldn’t mind that as much
Unless you are playing on high difficulty, you can comfortably play on a cheap pad ($16 + $4 adapter).
As for sweat, it seems like there might be two things going on there. One is you overheat, which you can control with a fan or something. Two is the actual sweat, which is annoying, but by no means bad in of itself. If you sincerely dislike it, you can self-modify to find it acceptable (might be worth doing anyway). There are plenty of resource on LW for how to do that.
One is you overheat, which you can control with a fan or something.
Nope. (I overheat strangely. It’s like my interior and my surface area aren’t connected. Aiming a strong fan at me will prevent exterior but not interior overheating. If I just stay under the fan after I stop exercising, I will get too cold on the outside while still being too hot on the inside.)
Two is the actual sweat, which is annoying, but by no means bad in of itself. If you sincerely dislike it, you can self-modify to find it acceptable (might be worth doing anyway). There are plenty of resource on LW for how to do that.
Not helpful.
I may look into the inexpensive pad and adapter, though.
You know, it might. I don’t like water but that’s not among my listed problems, so if I come up with a solution for which overheating (as opposed to sweating, which this wouldn’t affect) is the only problem, I will attempt this patch. Thanks!
If you don’t like water, but like lemonade (or some other drink that can be served chilled and isn’t too expensive), filling a water bottle with it can be nice. If it’s too sweet, it’ll make you thirsty, but watering it down fixes that. I tend to add just enough syrup/juice/whatever to water to make water palatable. (i dont like water either).
i know a person who has a medical condition that gets worse with exercise. they have to avoid it as much as possible because they can feel poorly for weeks afterwards (even moderate amounts of exercise, like walking too much). The condition in question is not a heart condition, but it is possible that there are other conditions that react poorly to exercise for different reasons than the one my friend has. So you should definitely consult with your doctor AND listen to your body. If you feel really crummy after exercise, you should be doing smaller amounts of exercise to build up your strength. If you feel really crummy after a tiny amount of exercise, you probably shouldn’t be exercising. Disclaimer: I am not a doctor.
solution to sweat: deodorant
solution to sunshine: a wide brimmed hat and sunscreen, if the problem is sunburn, or a sensitivity to light, or heat.
other solutions to sunshine, if you are a night owl: rollerblading at night—is safer than walking since you can zip by other people. is also less hot and sweaty. bicycling at night. these sorts of things are best done in well lit areas
another solution to sunshine: if you are in a building with an elevator, take the stairs at least part way up. if you have a washing machine, hang your clothes up on a clothesline to dry (i have a clothesliine over my bathtub. they’re easy to make. i don’t have a dryer, and hanging up heavy, wet clothes can be tiring, especially lifting them up over your head. you can also flush toilets with a heavy bucket of water (you dont have to empty the entire bucket, just a little bit will do. this saves quite a bit on the water bill as well—my water bill has gone down since the flush on my toilet broke. bake bread now and then. kneading bread is also quite a workout. if you take public transportation, get off a stop early when you aren’t in a hurry. little things like these add up and they’re often more interesting than sitting on an exercise bike—getting off early lets you explore on foot a part of town you might not have known as well. and these tips are all good for number 4 as well—they’re cheap. most of them (including the elevator one, since i’m living on the fifth floor and my building doesnt have one) are things i do not really by choice but because i’m that poor.
solution to boring: audio books! i prefer reading a book to listening to one, but listening to one is more interesting than listening to nothing. also, if you like television and are doing something that can be done in front of a television (yoga, stretching, lifting cans of beans and pretending they’re dumbbells...) then television is another option.
I do like lemonade, but I can only water it down a little before it starts tasting like water.
Deodorant does not work well enough and is not properly applied to all relevant locations.
I have textural issues with sunscreen, and don’t like the directed warmth and brightness of the sun even through it. (I walk outside on a sunny day and it’s like I can feel myself crisping up. Or steaming if it’s humid.) Hats worsen the sweat problem on the scalp.
Skating is unkind to my ankles; skates cost money. Bikes cost money and I don’t trust myself to bike safely in traffic. Helmets worsen the sweat problem on the scalp.
I take stairs when they’re handy most of the time.
I don’t like the texture my clothes have when they are hung dry. (I know this because sometimes I get a broken dryer and then strew my clothes around my room to dry rather than spending more quarters.)
I do mean to learn to bake bread, but can’t regularly count on being able to knead it; I routinely have small wounds on my fingers. (Don’t say gloves. No form of glove I am aware of both lacks texture issues for me and would be okay to knead bread with.)
Audio books have been mentioned. Cans of beans: interesting. May try that and see if it generates noticeable amounts of sweat. Yoga is physically painful to me in ways I am fairly sure are not supposed to happen.
Me too… and I’m Australian (where sunscreen is a necessity). I’m currently loving being in the UK and not needing it.
I also don’t wear makeup or use moisturiser for much the same reason (and suffer the social penalty for doing so in a business setting).
I did eventually find one sunscreen that I could actually use—one put out by the Australian Cancer council (their “everyday sunscreen”). Understandably, however, it’s not available anywhere else but Aus… though you might be able to find it (and try it) online if you’re not in Aus yourself.
It is the only sunscreen in the world (and I’ve tried very many) that you can’t actually feel after you put it on… and I’m the sort of person that can feel the moisturisers that are guaranteed to be unfeelable...
I have textural issues too although mine seem to have different triggers than yours. But it influences what foods I can eat (nothing squidgy, which might be a made up word, but it means mushrooms and anything else that feels like i’m eating a condom), what clothes I can wear (i can only wear nylon tights if i wear thick white socks underneath), even what kind of books I can read (smooth textures are the worst for me, my hands break out in sweat and i get a fight or flight response). i’ve used cotton gloves before to soak up some of the sweat from my textural problems, but any other type of glove would exacerbate it. i have to be really careful with what kind of socks i buy as well. -- no i’m not suggesting you knead dough in cotton gloves.
yeah, i had a feeling the deodorant thing wasn’t going to be too helpful—it’s nice for armpits, but you can’t slather it on your face or hands or feets or other places. and deodorant does nothing for the heat rash you get under the bra after sweating.
it’s true, bicycling and rollerblading cost money if you dont already have the equipment (i already have rollerblades, so its cheaper for me to use them than to take a bus—my rollerblades have saved me a lot more money than their initial cost, but that is only the case if you know you are going to be able to use them for transportation).
I think it’s probably best to just avoid the sun as much as possible.
another thing that is potentially exercise, if you like kids, looking after one for a while. true, you can just stand there and watch, but joining in tends to be a bit of a workout.
yoga should not be painful. you may be stretching too far. for example with lotus position (where you twist your legs up like a pretzel), you shouldnt do that until your body is ready to do that. instead, just put your feet together, and try to get the knees as close to the ground as you can without it hurting—if this means your thighs are at a 45° angle compared to your torso and floor, that’s okay. you do it so that it’s a tiny bit of a stretch, but not painful, and over time, you’re able to go farther. but if it’s not for you, it’s not for you. i will probably never be able to touch my toes. i can touch my knees. and i can touch a little farther, and then if i go any farther, it hurts, so i dont. I think stretching and yoga can probably be done safely by most people (definitely not all, though) if they granularise it enough—work on touching the knees before touching the top of the shin, then the middle top, then the middle, etc. but every body works differently and you know yours best—i only elaborate about the yoga because a lot of people seem to try to turn into a pretzel on day 1 and it doesnt work. my body is pretty weird actually. For example, walking (at all) is usually a bit painful for me, but rollerblading is not. something about the stride, or the way my foot is held tightly by the skate, but not too tightly.)
our local ice skating rink sometimes has deals where they let everyone in for free (but you still have to pay to rent skates). Maybe your local public pool (you did mention swimming) has similar specials from time to time.
having cats is also a source of exercise for me: carrying a heavy bag of kitty litter up 5 flights of stairs. then carrying dirty kitty litter down again. phew. and carrying them to the vet when one of them gets sick is exercise. My one cat has been sick , constantly, though something different each time, since October (UTI --> antibiotics --> diarrhea from the antibiotics --> ringworm --> nearly went bald --> eye infection. So for a while I was having to carry her (in my arms, with a leash attached in case she made a break for it) about a km every week or so. Thankfully, she’s much better now.
Seconded. The good kind of stretching is about teaching your muscles to relax (i.e. lengthen) on demand. When you feel pain that means you are putting strain on your connective tissue instead. This can lengthen the tissue over time but that’s not good for most people.
Thinking about the overheating… you might try getting some plastic-coated 5-lb hand weights, using them for arm exercises while watching a movie, and storing them in the refridgerator when not in use. Blood vessels are relatively close to the surface in the palms of the hands and soles of the feet, and I remember an experiment in forced thermoregulation which took advantage of that. Of course, it also involved a special suction-glove to increase blood flow, which is probably out of your price range.
The weights themselves are almost certainly out of my price range. I just don’t care enough about getting this done to work around my monetary neuroses. It turned out that my roommate has some 3lb weights (not covered with anything that would respond interestingly to refrigeration) and I was messing with those; my hands were not excessively warm during this process, so cooling something I hold in my hands would be of minimal help.
The thermoregulation experiment suggested that cooling the hands is a relatively efficient way to cool the whole body. I don’t think many people feel like their hands get too hot while they exercise, but there are apparently gains in endurance when exercisers keep something cold on their hands. These gains are most likely due to the body taking longer to overheat.
You could find out whether this works for you by timing how long something takes to produce noticeable overheating or sweat, then timing the same thing on a later day in very similar conditions, holding ice packs or something like that in your hands.
If you don’t want to induce extra overheating or sweat for the sake of the experiment, you could try holding something cold while doing something you have to do anyway (e.g. sometimes I have to go outside on a hot day). That way the worst likely outcome is not much worse than before unless you really hate holding cold things.
The weights only need to be made of something with reasonably high thermal mass, and the coating only needs to have thermal conductivity in a range that will allow the transfer of heat from your hands to the weights quickly enough to be useful but not quickly enough to be painful.
My theory here is that your core is well-insulated under most of your skin, but that the soles of your feet and palms of your hands are effectively gaps in this insulation. Under this theory, I would not expect your hands to feel hot when you’re exercising, since they contain no major heat source and have ready access to a major heat sink (the outside world). Cooling your hands just makes them a better heat sink for the rest of the body, reducing the need to sweat.
I also overheat, then get too cold after exercise.
For the overheating, I find that if I drink more water, I feel a bit better. I also run cold water over my wrists to cool down quickly after a workout.
Cooling down quickly causes me to overshoot, so I need to have a clean, dry shirt to put on, and a sweater or sweatshirt, handy to cope with the chills.
I don’t like the sweating either, but I try not interpret it in a negative way. “No one cares if look like I’m sweating.” “Sweating is a good way of removing toxins in the body. ” That sort of thing.
I play DDR at home (all you need is a DDR pad and a computer). It solves all the problems except the sweat. But since it’s at home, I would think you wouldn’t mind that as much (plus you can have a towel nearby). I find this the most convenient exercise ever, since I can do it at home, any time, and for free.
I once owned a DDR pad, but either it or the adapter I used to hook it up to my computer had a delay that made it unplayable. So I don’t have one anymore, and this therefore fails the expense criterion.
You presume incorrectly.
Unless you are playing on high difficulty, you can comfortably play on a cheap pad ($16 + $4 adapter).
As for sweat, it seems like there might be two things going on there. One is you overheat, which you can control with a fan or something. Two is the actual sweat, which is annoying, but by no means bad in of itself. If you sincerely dislike it, you can self-modify to find it acceptable (might be worth doing anyway). There are plenty of resource on LW for how to do that.
Nope. (I overheat strangely. It’s like my interior and my surface area aren’t connected. Aiming a strong fan at me will prevent exterior but not interior overheating. If I just stay under the fan after I stop exercising, I will get too cold on the outside while still being too hot on the inside.)
Not helpful.
I may look into the inexpensive pad and adapter, though.
I can’t be sure, but drinking cold water throughout might help.
You know, it might. I don’t like water but that’s not among my listed problems, so if I come up with a solution for which overheating (as opposed to sweating, which this wouldn’t affect) is the only problem, I will attempt this patch. Thanks!
If you don’t like water, but like lemonade (or some other drink that can be served chilled and isn’t too expensive), filling a water bottle with it can be nice. If it’s too sweet, it’ll make you thirsty, but watering it down fixes that. I tend to add just enough syrup/juice/whatever to water to make water palatable. (i dont like water either).
i know a person who has a medical condition that gets worse with exercise. they have to avoid it as much as possible because they can feel poorly for weeks afterwards (even moderate amounts of exercise, like walking too much). The condition in question is not a heart condition, but it is possible that there are other conditions that react poorly to exercise for different reasons than the one my friend has. So you should definitely consult with your doctor AND listen to your body. If you feel really crummy after exercise, you should be doing smaller amounts of exercise to build up your strength. If you feel really crummy after a tiny amount of exercise, you probably shouldn’t be exercising. Disclaimer: I am not a doctor.
solution to sweat: deodorant
solution to sunshine: a wide brimmed hat and sunscreen, if the problem is sunburn, or a sensitivity to light, or heat.
other solutions to sunshine, if you are a night owl: rollerblading at night—is safer than walking since you can zip by other people. is also less hot and sweaty. bicycling at night. these sorts of things are best done in well lit areas
another solution to sunshine: if you are in a building with an elevator, take the stairs at least part way up. if you have a washing machine, hang your clothes up on a clothesline to dry (i have a clothesliine over my bathtub. they’re easy to make. i don’t have a dryer, and hanging up heavy, wet clothes can be tiring, especially lifting them up over your head. you can also flush toilets with a heavy bucket of water (you dont have to empty the entire bucket, just a little bit will do. this saves quite a bit on the water bill as well—my water bill has gone down since the flush on my toilet broke. bake bread now and then. kneading bread is also quite a workout. if you take public transportation, get off a stop early when you aren’t in a hurry. little things like these add up and they’re often more interesting than sitting on an exercise bike—getting off early lets you explore on foot a part of town you might not have known as well. and these tips are all good for number 4 as well—they’re cheap. most of them (including the elevator one, since i’m living on the fifth floor and my building doesnt have one) are things i do not really by choice but because i’m that poor.
solution to boring: audio books! i prefer reading a book to listening to one, but listening to one is more interesting than listening to nothing. also, if you like television and are doing something that can be done in front of a television (yoga, stretching, lifting cans of beans and pretending they’re dumbbells...) then television is another option.
I do like lemonade, but I can only water it down a little before it starts tasting like water.
Deodorant does not work well enough and is not properly applied to all relevant locations.
I have textural issues with sunscreen, and don’t like the directed warmth and brightness of the sun even through it. (I walk outside on a sunny day and it’s like I can feel myself crisping up. Or steaming if it’s humid.) Hats worsen the sweat problem on the scalp.
Skating is unkind to my ankles; skates cost money. Bikes cost money and I don’t trust myself to bike safely in traffic. Helmets worsen the sweat problem on the scalp.
I take stairs when they’re handy most of the time.
I don’t like the texture my clothes have when they are hung dry. (I know this because sometimes I get a broken dryer and then strew my clothes around my room to dry rather than spending more quarters.)
I do mean to learn to bake bread, but can’t regularly count on being able to knead it; I routinely have small wounds on my fingers. (Don’t say gloves. No form of glove I am aware of both lacks texture issues for me and would be okay to knead bread with.)
Audio books have been mentioned. Cans of beans: interesting. May try that and see if it generates noticeable amounts of sweat. Yoga is physically painful to me in ways I am fairly sure are not supposed to happen.
Me too… and I’m Australian (where sunscreen is a necessity). I’m currently loving being in the UK and not needing it.
I also don’t wear makeup or use moisturiser for much the same reason (and suffer the social penalty for doing so in a business setting).
I did eventually find one sunscreen that I could actually use—one put out by the Australian Cancer council (their “everyday sunscreen”). Understandably, however, it’s not available anywhere else but Aus… though you might be able to find it (and try it) online if you’re not in Aus yourself.
It is the only sunscreen in the world (and I’ve tried very many) that you can’t actually feel after you put it on… and I’m the sort of person that can feel the moisturisers that are guaranteed to be unfeelable...
Fair enough.
I have textural issues too although mine seem to have different triggers than yours. But it influences what foods I can eat (nothing squidgy, which might be a made up word, but it means mushrooms and anything else that feels like i’m eating a condom), what clothes I can wear (i can only wear nylon tights if i wear thick white socks underneath), even what kind of books I can read (smooth textures are the worst for me, my hands break out in sweat and i get a fight or flight response). i’ve used cotton gloves before to soak up some of the sweat from my textural problems, but any other type of glove would exacerbate it. i have to be really careful with what kind of socks i buy as well. -- no i’m not suggesting you knead dough in cotton gloves.
yeah, i had a feeling the deodorant thing wasn’t going to be too helpful—it’s nice for armpits, but you can’t slather it on your face or hands or feets or other places. and deodorant does nothing for the heat rash you get under the bra after sweating.
it’s true, bicycling and rollerblading cost money if you dont already have the equipment (i already have rollerblades, so its cheaper for me to use them than to take a bus—my rollerblades have saved me a lot more money than their initial cost, but that is only the case if you know you are going to be able to use them for transportation).
I think it’s probably best to just avoid the sun as much as possible.
another thing that is potentially exercise, if you like kids, looking after one for a while. true, you can just stand there and watch, but joining in tends to be a bit of a workout.
yoga should not be painful. you may be stretching too far. for example with lotus position (where you twist your legs up like a pretzel), you shouldnt do that until your body is ready to do that. instead, just put your feet together, and try to get the knees as close to the ground as you can without it hurting—if this means your thighs are at a 45° angle compared to your torso and floor, that’s okay. you do it so that it’s a tiny bit of a stretch, but not painful, and over time, you’re able to go farther. but if it’s not for you, it’s not for you. i will probably never be able to touch my toes. i can touch my knees. and i can touch a little farther, and then if i go any farther, it hurts, so i dont. I think stretching and yoga can probably be done safely by most people (definitely not all, though) if they granularise it enough—work on touching the knees before touching the top of the shin, then the middle top, then the middle, etc. but every body works differently and you know yours best—i only elaborate about the yoga because a lot of people seem to try to turn into a pretzel on day 1 and it doesnt work. my body is pretty weird actually. For example, walking (at all) is usually a bit painful for me, but rollerblading is not. something about the stride, or the way my foot is held tightly by the skate, but not too tightly.)
our local ice skating rink sometimes has deals where they let everyone in for free (but you still have to pay to rent skates). Maybe your local public pool (you did mention swimming) has similar specials from time to time.
having cats is also a source of exercise for me: carrying a heavy bag of kitty litter up 5 flights of stairs. then carrying dirty kitty litter down again. phew. and carrying them to the vet when one of them gets sick is exercise. My one cat has been sick , constantly, though something different each time, since October (UTI --> antibiotics --> diarrhea from the antibiotics --> ringworm --> nearly went bald --> eye infection. So for a while I was having to carry her (in my arms, with a leash attached in case she made a break for it) about a km every week or so. Thankfully, she’s much better now.
Seconded. The good kind of stretching is about teaching your muscles to relax (i.e. lengthen) on demand. When you feel pain that means you are putting strain on your connective tissue instead. This can lengthen the tissue over time but that’s not good for most people.
Thinking about the overheating… you might try getting some plastic-coated 5-lb hand weights, using them for arm exercises while watching a movie, and storing them in the refridgerator when not in use. Blood vessels are relatively close to the surface in the palms of the hands and soles of the feet, and I remember an experiment in forced thermoregulation which took advantage of that. Of course, it also involved a special suction-glove to increase blood flow, which is probably out of your price range.
The weights themselves are almost certainly out of my price range. I just don’t care enough about getting this done to work around my monetary neuroses. It turned out that my roommate has some 3lb weights (not covered with anything that would respond interestingly to refrigeration) and I was messing with those; my hands were not excessively warm during this process, so cooling something I hold in my hands would be of minimal help.
The thermoregulation experiment suggested that cooling the hands is a relatively efficient way to cool the whole body. I don’t think many people feel like their hands get too hot while they exercise, but there are apparently gains in endurance when exercisers keep something cold on their hands. These gains are most likely due to the body taking longer to overheat.
You could find out whether this works for you by timing how long something takes to produce noticeable overheating or sweat, then timing the same thing on a later day in very similar conditions, holding ice packs or something like that in your hands.
If you don’t want to induce extra overheating or sweat for the sake of the experiment, you could try holding something cold while doing something you have to do anyway (e.g. sometimes I have to go outside on a hot day). That way the worst likely outcome is not much worse than before unless you really hate holding cold things.
The weights only need to be made of something with reasonably high thermal mass, and the coating only needs to have thermal conductivity in a range that will allow the transfer of heat from your hands to the weights quickly enough to be useful but not quickly enough to be painful.
My theory here is that your core is well-insulated under most of your skin, but that the soles of your feet and palms of your hands are effectively gaps in this insulation. Under this theory, I would not expect your hands to feel hot when you’re exercising, since they contain no major heat source and have ready access to a major heat sink (the outside world). Cooling your hands just makes them a better heat sink for the rest of the body, reducing the need to sweat.
I suppose I’ll pop the weights in the fridge and see what happens; couldn’t hurt.
I also overheat, then get too cold after exercise.
For the overheating, I find that if I drink more water, I feel a bit better. I also run cold water over my wrists to cool down quickly after a workout.
Cooling down quickly causes me to overshoot, so I need to have a clean, dry shirt to put on, and a sweater or sweatshirt, handy to cope with the chills.
I don’t like the sweating either, but I try not interpret it in a negative way. “No one cares if look like I’m sweating.” “Sweating is a good way of removing toxins in the body. ” That sort of thing.