I've been hitting the recumbent exercise bike over the last two weeks. I prefer walking on a treadmill, but I am still carrying 285 pounds, so I'm trying to save wear and tear on my lower extremities. The non-weight bearing exercise helps with that.
My goal is a regular 60 or 90 minute ride, but right now I'm at 30 minutes. One of the challenges is that my left leg (for whatever reason only my left) gets a bit tingly 15 minutes into the ride.
Now, I come from a tradition of sitting on a rowing machine for north of an hour at a piece, and I have a little bit of a built in resistance to taking breaks in the middle of workouts. This is especially true when I'm tracking heart rate -- I like to be at my target, and getting off of the machine drops my heart rate.
However, it _has_ been productive to take a 60 second stretch break every 10 - 13 minutes or so. I press "pause" on my heart rate tracker, and just stand up and stretch. At first it was a mental hurdle to allow myself to do this, but now it feels great.
There are different types of pain or discomfort when training -- my feeling is that nerve compression is a kind of mildly 'bad' pain. It's not productively strengthening anything, it's just discomfort. There's not a lot of reason to work through it. I would say though that there is not a lot of reason to focus on it either. The discomfort is mild, and there might be a tendency to make a bigger deal out of it than it is, beyond just taking a 60 second stretch break.
