Staying healthy at sea.

[tamugly]

Just wanted yalls ways to stay fit at sea. It is pretty hard with the southern cooking and gallons of coffee consumed. What does everyone do as far as exercise besides having a little gym on their vessel? Anyone do any sort of training or diet while at work? The ship is a jungle gym, wanting to know how y'all use it.

[GYRO]

I try to walk on deck every day ....if possible of course. I have to agree with you, pressing buttons while sitting in the chair is hardly an exercise.

[Bouchard Captain]

Staying fit at sea?
Well at our company the exercise equipment was removed as a potential safety hazard...
we do our own shopping here..so the health conscious will do their own shopping ...
(no one will take your list from your hand and hunt for hours for the specialty items that you need)
as far as gallons of coffee go? well let me put it to you this way, we have enough coffee on-board to last about 6 months here...
the only exercise you will receive is lifting the paint brush and paint can...& the chipping equipment ...

[cmakin]

When I was at sea, as an engineer; just standing watch and carrying out my daily routine was very helpful in keeping a base of fitness. On one vessel, a few of us ordered a rowing machine, but it was used by the Deck Department much more than the engineers. Of course one can meter what one eats. Too bad I don't do much of either now. . . .

[DeckApe]

There are books with detailed workouts someone can do without a gym. Amazon has a ton of those. A quick search for "workout without weights in books" popped out several.

[tamugly]

I know TRX straps are out there for body weight workouts too.

[frogstomp81]

I just picked up a pair of gymnastics rings and straps. Plenty of exercises possible with your body weight and a little ingenuity.

[injunear]

I remember years ago after a safety meeting, we were having a discussion about what to do with the excess grub money. many of the young guys wanted exercise equipment. The captain, on hearing this grumbled something about the CM was evidently not assigning enough work.

[Knottyboy]

There are hundreds of excercises you can do with resistance bands and not to mention good ol fashioned pull ups and pushups. Youtube and Mens Health.com are full of useful information. Excercising isnt the hard part, its motivation to do it!!

[tamugly]

I know there are books and body weight exercises.... Anyone get creative on their vessel? Anyone actually try to be more healthy at work?

[BeringCapt]

I know there are books and body weight exercises.... Anyone get creative on their vessel? Anyone actually try to be more healthy at work?

I do fifteen laps from bridge to back deck incorporating as many stairs as possible with a 40 lb weight vest which works out to 60 stories and I have no idea of distance.

[fourdegreesc]

I know TRX straps are out there for body weight workouts too.

x2 on the TRX. It is really great for strength training.

Our safety idiots also banned dumbells (the metal ones, not the ones at the office) and much of our workout gear was removed when we went to work for Shell. Running on the heliport is forbidden, but we pulled a permit to "run at night." So I run and do TRX. The TRX is expensive, but once you get used to it there are some hard things you can do on it.

[jdcavo]

I relied on push ups, sit ups, and a jump rope.

[tamugly]

How about alternative sources of energy. Aside from coffee and cigs... Anyone use mio energy?

[Wolfesown47th]

I had a Captain who was a mountian climber and was always trying to stay in top shape for some impending climb. He wore a back pack with weight in it, i don't remember how much, and would jog around the deck and jog up and down stairs all over the boat.

[highseasmechanic]

This last trip I've been on, I have been doing push ups, sit ups, pull ups on piping, and air squats. You can do a variety of different exercises with just body weight, and with the amount of variety you can do with the basic exercises, you can keep your body guessing. As for food, it's hard when there is only one entree. I strive to eat smaller portions, drink more water, and eat more greens (salad).

[richard8000milesaway]

Oil and Gas Large Tonnage Ships and Rigs all have helicopter landing pads: perfect for my 1 hour jog.
It's the best way to stay in shape: about 20 miles a week jogging at 10 minute miles....
READ ARTICLE BELOW:

Thor Swift
Moderate exercise may be more beneficial than vigorous workouts.

For people who exercise but fret that they really should be working out more, new studies may be soothing. The amount of exercise needed to improve health and longevity, this new science shows, is modest, and more is not necessarily better.

That is the message of the newest and perhaps most compelling of the studies, which was presented on Saturday at the annual meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine in San Francisco. For it, researchers at the University of South Carolina Arnold School of Public Health and other institutions combed through the health records of 52,656 American adults who’d undergone physicals between 1971 and 2002 as part of the Aerobics Center Longitudinal Study at the Cooper Institute in Dallas. Each participant completed physical testing and activity questionnaires and returned for at least one follow-up visit.

The researchers found that about 27 percent of the participants reported regularly running, although in wildly varying amounts and paces.

The scientists then checked death reports.

Over the course of the study, 2,984 of the participants died. But the incidence was much lower among the group that ran. Those participants had, on average, a 19 percent lower risk of dying from any cause than non-runners.

Notably, in closely parsing the participants’ self-reported activities, the researchers found that running in moderation provided the most benefits. Those who ran 1 to 20 miles per week at an average pace of about 10 or 11 minutes per mile — in other words, jogging — reduced their risk of dying during the study more effectively than those who didn’t run, those (admittedly few) who ran more than 20 miles a week, and those who typically ran at a pace swifter than seven miles an hour.

“These data certainly support the idea that more running is not needed to produce extra health and mortality benefits,” said Dr. Carl J. Lavie, medical director of cardiac rehabilitation and prevention at the Ochsner Medical Center in New Orleans and an author of the study. “If anything,” he continued, “it appears that less running is associated with the best protection from mortality risk. More is not better, and actually, more could be worse.”

His analysis echoes the results of another new examination of activity and mortality, in which Danish scientists used 27 years’ worth of data collected for the continuing Copenhagen City Heart Study. They reported that those Danes who spent one to two and a half hours per week jogging at a “slow or average pace” during the study period had longer life spans than their more sedentary peers and than those who ran at a faster pace.

This decidedly modest amount of exercise led to an increase of, on average, 6.2 years in the life span of male joggers and 5.6 years in women.

“We can say with certainty that regular jogging increases longevity,” Dr. Peter Schnorr, a cardiologist and an author of the study, said in presenting the findings at a clinical meeting organized last month by the European Association for Cardiovascular Prevention and Rehabilitation. “The good news is that you don’t actually need to do that much to reap the benefits.”

“The relationship appears much like alcohol intakes,” he continued. “Mortality is lower in people reporting moderate jogging than in non-joggers or those undertaking extreme levels of exercise.”

There’s further confirmation of that idea in the findings of a large study of exercise habits published last year in The Lancet, which showed that among a group of 416,175 Taiwanese adults, 92 minutes a week of moderate exercise, like walking, gentle jogging or cycling, increased life span by about three years and decreased the risk of mortality from any cause by about 14 percent.

In that study, those who embarked on more ambitious exercise programs did gain additional risk reduction, as seems only fair, but the benefits plateaued rapidly. For each further 15 minutes per week of moderate exercise that someone completed beyond the first 92, his or her mortality risk fell, but by only about another 4 percent.

Whether and at what point more exercise becomes counterproductive remains uncertain. “In general, it appears that exercise, like any therapy, results in a bell-shaped curve in terms of response and benefit,” says Dr. James H. O’Keefe, a cardiologist and lead author of a thought-provoking review article published on Monday in Mayo Clinic Proceedings that examines whether extreme amounts of vigorous exercise, particularly running, can harm the heart.

“To date, the data suggests that walking and light jogging are almost uniformly beneficial for health and do increase life span,” Dr. O’Keefe says. “But with more vigorous or prolonged exercise, the benefits can become questionable.

“I’m a fan of distance running,” he adds. “I run. But after about 45 to 60 minutes a day, you reach a point of diminishing returns, and at some point, you risk toxicity.”

His advice? The study by Dr. Lavie and his colleagues offers excellent guidelines for safe and effective exercise, Dr. O’Keefe says. “Twenty miles a week or less of jogging at a 10- or 11-minute-mile pace can add years to your life span. That’s very good news.” Indeed it is — especially since that routine happens to replicate almost exactly my own weekly exercise regimen.

“I wouldn’t automatically discourage people from doing more if they really want to” and are not experiencing side effects, like extreme fatigue or repeated injuries, Dr. O’Keefe continued. “But the message from the latest data is that the sweet spot for exercise seems to come with less.”

[tamugly]

It seems pretty counter productive for companies offering full benefits to deny access to an exercise facility! One would think that the master of the vessel can use his judgement as to when it is too rough to use it. Every story I've heard, however, always starts with our out of shape/fat/slob coordinator took away our gym. So with that being said, how far can you go before you have a 'gym'? That's what I'm getting at. Are there solid pipes y'all do pull ups on or I've heard of guys on ro/ros doing all sorts of training in the garage.

[ChiefRob]

Most of the time the excercise equipment can stay until someone gets hurt or does something stupid. Then it becomes a liabilty issue with the company or safety man. We have a full gym, and a heliport as well. Someone earlier mentioned running on the heliport, the company man shut that down for us, but you can go out there and walk laps still. There are a few pipes around the boat that people have found one in particular under the ROV deck that is perfect for doing pull ups. I have a spot in the engine room on the ballast manifold that is perfect to get your feet under to do sit ups. For not much money you can go to wall mart and buy a set of perfect push ups things, and ab wheel, or ab roller, a jump rope, and some elastic straps that you can keep all in your room or bag, and have your own gym if one is not available. The most important part of an excerse program is to have a diet plan stick with it and do some type of workout routine everyday. It does not take much and you will start to see a big difference if you stick with it. That is the biggest problem is the motivation to get started, then the will power to stick with your commitment.

[tamugly]

I recently heard of doing an exercise every hour on watch. One hour bang out a set of push ups, next hour a set of sit ups... You get the idea.