Simple Lifting Exercises for Older People.

Louis Shalako

Boy, it sucks getting older, eh.

Or maybe it’s not so bad—at least, at long last, we seem to have our shit together. It’s got something to do with that attitude.

It happens in a number of ways.

I had to get over my shyness, (or maybe I just wanted to) and one way of doing that was to exercise on the beach. I have all kinds of thoughts on the subject.

If people want to laugh, that’s fine with me.

I am also a bit of a comic character, so there.

I’ve done a couple of short sets of very simple upper-body exercises today. It’s important not to hurt myself, as I have to go to work tomorrow. Quite frankly, I need the money. I can’t afford to quit, let alone be injured.

At the beach this morning, I used a big rock which probably weighs six to eight pounds. I was glad to see that no one had stolen it in the night.

It’s got a good shape so that I can keep a proper grip on it. I wouldn’t want to drop that on my foot or on my phone, both of which would be painful I am sure.

The first exercise is simple curls, which can be done one-armed with different sized dumbbells. Or a rock. I did ten or twelve of those. This is for the biceps. I’m standing for all of these exercises. Then I do lifts straight up, an overall shoulder exercise, another ten or twelve.

Then I do lifts up and outwards from each shoulder, on roughly a forty-five degree angle.

I’ll do five or six of each, and at this point, my hands are definitely a bit shaky. If a beautiful woman walks past, I am resolved to smile and nod and to say hi.

Then I do another kind of simple lift. This involves holding the rock down by the hip.

Now simply straight-arm the rock up to the horizon in front of the face. Hold it for three seconds, and then lower it down again. You want to maintain control of the rock. I do about three to five of those. Then there is a similar lift where I’m holding it by my hip and lifting it straight out sideways from the shoulder. You can feel it pulling on your shoulder muscles, that is for sure. Bring the rock up to the horizon, hold it for three seconds, and then lower it carefully down again. By this time, about three of these are more than enough when first starting out. You can always pick a different rock if it is too heavy or too light. The last exercise is to hold the rock down by the hip and then curl it up, stroking it up in close alongside of my body. It’s an underarm lift.

Later, back home in my living room, I took the ten-pound dumbbell and at full arm extension, laid it on the carpet above my head. I’m lying flat on my back. From there, I straight-arm it up so it’s above my chest and my head. Straight up, and then carefully lower it down to a few inches above the carpet. After three of those, maybe four, I switched arms. I switch hands with the weight off to one side. If I drop it, it’s not going to hit me. The next exercise is similar. Only in this case, the lift is from an arm extended out to the side from the shoulder. 

This is another straight-arm lift, and I bring the dumbbell up above the centre of my chest, or above my chin, that sort of thing. This leads to the last of the very simple exercises I have been doing. This is a simple dumbbell-press, straight up and down again to the shoulder. I alternate arms after ten or twelve repetitions. If you have a bar, you would be using both arms. I recommend very small loads for older people just starting out. What you want is more repetitions in that case.

You want to establish the habit, and that means not hurting yourself or trying to change the world in a day or two.

Right?

Here’s the thing. When you get older, you might sleep on your side and then you wake up in the morning with pain in between the shoulders. You have a really good sleep and then wake up with a crick in the neck. This is due to lack of muscle tone, where the simple weight of your body is putting stress and compression on muscles and joints that aren’t able to properly withstand it.

Note, none of these exercises will do much for that little pot-belly, but simply standing to do them probably does strengthen the core-body group of muscles—which was why I was at the beach in the first place. I stand navel-deep in the cool lake water and soak the pain out of my hips and lower back, the knees. After a while, I lean over and soak my elbows and wrists. I walk around a bit. Try and stand up, resist the force of the light waves. Stand up on the land, raise the chin and try to get a bit of a curve into that lower back…it’s funny how often you hear a little click in the stiff or sore area, as something drops back into its proper place. 

Walking on sand is an exercise in itself.

Being barefoot in the sun and the sand has its Zen-like qualities. It is sensual. It helps to get in touch with your own body.

It is a minor workout in its own right. Quite frankly, it seems to do a lot for me, and no doubt some of that is pure Zen, i.e. a kind of personal applied psychology. It’s all about the quality of your life.

For that reason, a light and simple routine might be of great benefit to anyone who is interested. As for my own goals, I’ve never really had pectorals in my entire life. Not much, anyways. At the age of 58 years old, it would be interesting to see if I could actually give myself some.

Otherwise I’m going to be stuck forever with this saggy little pair of man-tits.

END

Image Credit. By Raquel Baranow - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=43853612



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What Would A Basic Minimum Income For Ontario Look Like?

http://wallpapercave.com/w/AhN6BZh

Louis Shalako

What would a basic minimum income look like for Ontario?

It’s very hard to say without knowing what the government’s pilot project actually looks like. 

Hopefully we’ll get more information on that very soon.

Let us assume the goal is to get every citizen at least up to the poverty line. While this number varies according to location across the province, living in Toronto and other major cities being more expensive than living in some other places, let us assume this is about $20,000.00 per year for a single adult.

In Switzerland, they’ll be voting on one such proposal on June 5. If you look closely, you’ll see that the program will be funded approximately 75 % by new taxes and the rest is expected to come from savings in other social programs. We are comparing apples to oranges here, but Switzerland, like Canada and the Province of Ontario are capitalistic, socialist states. They’re relatively affluent, not only in natural resources, but agriculture, technology, and their present state of development.

In Kenya, as little as $250.00 to $400.00 a year can make a big difference in health and welfare outcomes.

In Ontario, the only thing really under discussion is a pilot program, much like the one in Dauphin, Manitoba in the 1970s. If you take a small community, the cost of a pilot program is much less than the institution of such a program over an entire province or country.

Under such circumstances, one could have a very successful pilot program, one costing five or ten or twenty million dollars without ever having to justify it politically, without ever even speculating as to where all the funding might actually come from. Back then, the one in Dauphin cost $17 million overall—pocket change by modern, budgetary standards.

While I have no doubt that the government is prepared to make such a social experiment, (heading to the polls a short time later), one has to wonder just how serious they are at pursuing this to a logical end—or whether this is just another cleverly disguised attempt to gut the Ontario Disability Support Program, or Ontario Works, or whatever.

Proponents usually contend that such programs will be funded entirely by savings in other programs—or they sure don’t mind being misinterpreted along such lines, but if so, then such programs must inevitably be underfunded, for surely the government social programs they are intended to replace have always been underfunded. This has been true since day one, and that includes the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board, and a hundred other programs administered by this government.

Here’s an Ontario Works (welfare) rate chart. A single person would receive, per month, $305.00 for their basic needs and $376.00 for shelter costs—which is about half what I pay for rent, although I’m not on welfare. In this province, benefits are divided into ‘basic needs’ and ‘shelter costs.’ If you don’t have a home, (or at least an address), then you don’t qualify for shelter costs. (The government did away with moving benefits some time ago, although start-up benefits may still be available depending on program. For the most part, these programs have been fiscally gutted by this very same government.)

Back to our point.

That’s $681.00 a month to keep body and soul together. Inevitably, most of that will go for rent, and that’s why people on welfare line up at food banks. They end up homeless and on the street, and they end up in a whole host of unenviable social situations such as divorce, court, jail and in other programs largely dedicated to mental health and addictions. How much of this will be alleviated by living in less stressful social conditions, and how will this translate into sufficient savings and efficiencies to justify the basic minimum income social program?

That’s a real good question and one worth asking.

It’s as much about people as it is about saving money or redistributing income in an era of growing inequality and degenerating social justice.

It’s a simple equation.

Where there is no hope there is no incentive. Life is hard at the lowest socio-economic strata. 

People are the same everywhere. They all need the same things. And it’s just what they can’t get. They’re not going anywhere and they know it. And the day is long—very long. I know that from personal experience. Filling that day leads to social problems largely stemming from boredom, desperation and availability.

The $681.00 a month adds up to $8,172.00 a year. This is approximately $12,000.00 below the poverty line, which I make out to be about $20,000.00 a year in anything but a major city. 

I am referring to Ontario, Canada, 2016, just so we are defining our terms accurately.

Assuming the goal of an anti-poverty program is to bring people up to the poverty line, this is $12,000.00 that has to come from somewhere—somewhere else, as the taxpayers are no doubt already saying.

That’s an additional $1,000.00 a month, which would admittedly change people’s lives. The problem is that there are something like 750,000 clients of the ODSP program in the province, and probably another 125,000 families on Ontario Works. This does not address the numbers of unemployed and underemployed family members who fall below the poverty line. 

Neither does it include the millions of Ontarians working full time hours for minimum, sub-poverty wages. Just for the record, I know a lot of these people personally. My own bias has been disclosed.

Ahem.

If their family income went up, it is entirely possible that their taxable income would also go up—a fact often overlooked by commentators who have never experienced the challenges. 

Basically if you want to tax the poor, first you have to give them a raise. But it is entirely possible that middle class taxes could go down or be reduced under such a system.

The real question is, would that new life cause or incur savings in other areas, to the tune of $1,000.00 a month, or greater, from the ‘mean average’ or median individual in question. 

This is the question the taxpayers should be asking.

For parents with children, or for adults with dependent adults in the household, the no-questions-asked aspect of the proposed basic minimum income has to sound pretty good.

For a single person on disability, (ODSP) it has to sound pretty good. In my own case, I can honestly say that an additional eight or nine hundred bucks a month would make a big difference in my diet, my clothing certainly—and communication, transportation and entertainment. It would allow me to invest a small amount each and every month into my business and maybe even into some kind of savings program.

I’ll be of retirement age in another eight years. After that, the ODSP has no hold on me. It would be nice if the benefits could remain in force even when a recipient went out of province or even out of the country—perhaps for up to six months at a time.

Here’s a funny thing, and I don’t think it’s a contradiction at all. But I get a pension, and I also work full time as a writer; which is admittedly one of the most marginal professions going.

The problem, is that I don’t make enough money in this new abundance economy. That problem is only compounded for people with a family to feed and a home to make and a shit part-time job in some scab industry which is already being subsidized by scab wages, an abundance of unskilled labour and this crazy mind-set that somehow work brings dignity. The truth is that leisure and the arts bring dignity.

The problem is that this is only a trial balloon, never meant to actually float.

You heard it here first.

There’s not enough good jobs to go around, but there’s nothing we can do about poverty per se. There are only so many skills to go around—and colleges and universities and training programs also cost this province a lot of money and there aren’t always enough jobs for those graduates.

But here’s an interesting thing. The federal government already pays Harmonized Sales Tax rebates. They already pay or contribute to Child Daycare Tax Credits. They already pay pension benefits to the elderly and there are federal disability programs. (And it’s a crock of shit because I didn’t qualify.) The province pays plenty to the almost universally excoriated Workplace Safety and Insurance Board.

They’re already spending hundreds of billions between the two levels of government for bloated and inefficient bureaucracies, and yes, this includes the police, court and prison systems. This already includes the medical, hospital and mental health systems. It also employs a lot of people at a relatively high level of income and status. This is a concern that will have to be addressed, to the tune of much angst no doubt.

It is only by bringing in a much smaller government apparatus, and perhaps some incremental increase in tax assessment rates that this program has a hope of succeeding universally, in the long term.

There are already mechanisms in place to pay the money—the federal and provincial income tax systems come to mind. With modern algorithmic systems and self-reporting, with verification through existing channels, the program could be made to work if the political and social will actually exists to do so.

You sort of have to wonder.

END