Reactive Airway Nightmare! Music/Fitness relation!
- rongunz
- Dec 2, 2017
- 3 min read
Hey Gunz Crew,
With the release of Alexander, I've been able to rest easy a tad. At least now I know I don't have to shell out money for digital releases anymore! Having said that, these past two weeks have been anything but easy.
For those not familiar, I was diagnosed with Reactive Airway Disease back in 2011. It is like a seasonal form of asthma, of which is triggered by either allergens I can be sensitive to, food or just environment. Since moving to Tampa back in 2014, I did not have any symptoms follow me down here and have been able to breathe easy to the point where I didn't have to deal with wheezing ever. The only time it would come to haunt me would be whenever I head to NYC to visit friends and family, particularly in the winter/early spring of which it would trigger bad enough to use my dad's inhaler when available.
For whatever reason, after recovering from a head cold I got from my daughter, RAD came back to haunt me. The wheezing has returned, tightness in chest, coughing and spitting mucus. I am not sure what triggered it to come back but it's back. The good news about it is that it is not bad enough to where I have to immediately go to the hospital and get nebulized or forced to use an inhaler but it does make something as simple as sleeping an issue because when it is silent in the room, I can hear it. I have to either take Melatonin, put headphones on with music blasting, watch something loud or exert myself physically to complete exhaustion.
I do admit, though, that I've already had at least two to three instances where, in my solitude, away from my girlfriend and my daughter, I've had either an emotional breakdown or a panic attack from seeing this come back to where the RAD gets close enough to an asthma attack but eventually I force myself to calm down in order to ease the situation. As far my diet goes, this is the reason why I am very minimal to nonexistent when it comes to milk or dairy, even if the dairy is plant/nut-based. To a certain degree, it feels like my body is dropping weight as a result. On the bright side, seeing my body stop being stubborn and drop from 280 to 270 in over a week is a good change, as I felt as though all this water logging has been a pain, as well as never having that empty stomach feeling I need so that I can properly assess and engage my eating plan.
As I had been studying, I finally started seeing a connection between being a fitness trainer, a musician and the average person experiencing whatever those two are doing. It is similar to an analogy I once saw KRS ONE use in one of his speeches when it comes to having an electrician and an painter in the same house. Same environment, same location but what they see to fix and be necessary in the house will be night and day, down to even the terminology and language.
To an average person hitting the gym, all they usually see consists of lifting weight, getting swole, jacked, ripped or getting fit. To the fitness professional, they are analyzing biomechanics, the relationship between the nervous system the skeletal and muscular systems work together, seeing which forms of programming stimulate the nervous system to lift quickly to what stimulates the body to adapt, evolve and endure. If someone looked at my current routine, which is a pyramid of 5 reps per set going up and then reverse pyramid doing repetitions until failure, they'll think I'm just piling it up and burning myself out, which is the oversimplified version of what is happening. Step into my brain and see it through my eyes and what you'll see is a hybrid of hypertrophy and strength training -- or to make it easier to understand, getting stronger while getting swole and trust me, some of the strongest men in the world aren't necessarily swole, either.
See a guitarist play, most people would simply see an individual making sounds and melodies but to the guitarist, they concocting at times a fusion of legato, vibrato, chord progressions, staccato, inversions, sustain, polyrhythms or scales/modes intertwined. Before you know it, I finally saw the connection for myself regarding music and fitness and why I cannot exclude one from the other.
Comments