Pool exercises good for arthritis - and teasing

Three days a week, I strip down to a swimsuit and exercise with up to a half-dozen women.

If that doesn’t give you self-confidence as a pudgy middle-aged man, don’t even bother with Dale Carnegie’s coursework.

I used to swim for fun, recreation and relaxation. Those aren’t the reasons one would rise early and show up at the pool at 7 a.m. You would do it out of desperation to try and stay a step or two ahead of arthritis.

A body can do things and stretch in ways that are much less painful in the water than on a yoga mat in the living room floor with a dog licking your face. The dogs and I love getting down on the floor together but one of us doesn’t get up very well.

The ladies I exercise with are nice and I repay their politeness by entertaining them by doing exercises wrong, falling off the water noodles and dunking myself. They all like to embarrass me in public by telling me I look good with my clothes on when they see me.

Yes, I’m older than all but one of the ladies in the class. Her presence is little comfort though, as she’s the only one who can actually get out of the pool without using the ladder steps or the handicap lift.

ENMU’s Natatorium has been around about four years longer than this columnist and I have quite a history of recreating there. In first grade, my best friend Jay Thompson lived on campus in De Baca Hall, where his mother, a grad student, was head resident. We spent our spare time riding bikes on the spacious campus sidewalks and swimming at the Nat.

Back then ENMU had swimming and dive teams and there were low and high dives and a slide. Summers inside the building were a lot like a sauna but we could take a swim then slip out the back door to lay in the shade.

It is still approximately 60 years old — the building and my body — so we don’t work as well as we used to or relish our time like we once did.

As an ENMU student I took SCUBA lessons in the pool and got my dive card there. We had to tread water in the deep end of the pool for a ridiculously long time (half the class period). More recently I’ve been ordered out of the deep end because the 20-year-old lifeguard felt I wasn’t safe there. Wow, that one hurt.

Several years ago, my wife and I took an aqua aerobics class there. It focused on overall fitness including some actual aerobics in the water set to music. The class I’m in now is called aqua fitness and I just work on stretching my crooked spine out and attempting to make each of the joints in my body function just a little bit.

It helps keep me more flexible and may even be making me more fit. It comes at a price though as I get a fair amount of teasing at the sound effects coming from my mouth as exercise. On a bad day when I’m really stiff, they check with me after every groan though.

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:

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