Steve has been working closely as a personal training client and has an amazing story. When he came in he had a goal to get back into shape and get serious about his health. We are very proud of you Steve and honored to share your story!
Here’s Steve’s journey in his words:
About 18 months ago I decided to step away from full-time work. I told my friends and colleagues I was retiring to pursue "health and fun." I was closing in on age 67. A factor in my decision was that my parents had passed away at ages 64 and 72 from heart ailments. I figured I better get after it.
For decades I played basketball, jogged, and tried to stay active. But the combination of pursing yet another start-up company and COVID had put me out of shape and overweight. Plus, I had pretty much ignored my medical health, rarely going to a doctor.
Given my new lease on life, I started getting serious about walking 4 miles or so every day with my dogs. I signed up for a primary care physician and through a series of tests discovered I had early stages of cardiovascular disease and stage 3 prostate cancer. I got the cancer treated with a new procedure and am now in remission. So next was working on lifestyle changes with my cardiologist to get healthy. I adjusted my diet (minimize sugars, reduce calories, focus on plant-based foods) and adopted intermittent fasting.
I recently moved to Nevada as a snowbird and last spring soon after my cancer procedure I decided to sign-up for CrossFit. What appealed to me was muscle confusion exercise and functional training. As I get older, I believe it is important to maintain my function: ability to get up and down while building strength, stamina, flexibility, and balance.
Truthfully, I was apprehensive about getting started. My conditioning was way off, and I was worried that I would have trouble learning new things at my age. I decided that personal training at CrossFit Ampersand with coach Eli would be best for me to get started.
In the beginning I had trouble completing a single strict push-up. I was also constantly hitting the cap in planned workouts, i.e., not completing within the allocated time even for the greatly reduced targets. Now I am progressing and getting better. I regularly set personal records and almost always get the planned sets done within the time caps.
I know that I miss out on some of the benefits of CrossFit from not joining a class session. I see that the friendly competition and the mutual encouragement creates a nice atmosphere. However, the private lessons with Eli work best for me. He designs workouts for me each day that challenge me and help me progress as the difficulty keeps increasing, but just within my reach.
Eli also makes sure I have my exercise watch app turned on so the I can track my heart rate.
When he sees me overexerting, he encourages me to check my heart rate so I can keep it within my planned bounds. My cardiologist wants me to do intervals, but I have a target maximum she'd like me to stay within. I am getting more and more done within that maximum. I also do the Genoa Loop hike (10 miles with 1500' elevation gain) once or twice most weekends.
Since starting l am down about 40 lbs in fat and have added almost 10 lbs in muscle. Heart rate recovery is a good measure of cardiovascular health. The other day my heartrate dropped 47 bpm in 2 minutes after a strenuous exercise. When I started that was less than 10 bpm in 2 minutes. This summer I am averaging four CrossFit workouts per week and Eli has been awesome working with me when I must adjust schedules. l am a big proponent of CrossFit Ampersand and working with Eli.
Congratulations Steve on all of your progress and hard work!