IOL Strength and Conditioning

Monday was Day One of my return to regular weight training after six months of corrective exercise rehab. Most of my forum pals can’t fathom why I would consider taking that much time away from the gym, and truthfully if I’d have known in advance it would take that long, I wouldn’t have done it.

At least, not until something decked me, which once you see the list you’ll realize was about to happen. Talk about a train wreck!

Tired of daily back aches and knowing there wasn’t an actual injury causing the problem, I decided at the first of the year to take a month and try to figure it out. Six months have passed, and take a look at the list of nagging niggles that are now either completely gone or at least mostly gone and fading fast.

Chronic pains that I’d had for months, years or decades – note the past tense:

Joints hurt, especially in the morning
Lousy posture, real lousy
Head tilted to one side slightly
Couldn’t turn head to the right very well
Twinge in the neck when turning head left
One shoulder raised
Internally rotated shoulders (palms facing rear)
Right shoulder ache
Impingement pain under left scapula
Elbow ache
Wrist ache
Thumb ache
Upper back ache
Lower back ache
Scoliosis (functional not actual)
One leg shorter than the other (functional not actual)
Shifted from leg to leg when standing, due to hip pain
Habitually stood on one leg with hip jutted out
Achilles tendonitis
Heel pain (resulting in a closet full of perfect left shoes and worn-down right shoes with costly insoles and heel lifts)
Dropped metatarsal, both feet
Duck walk (toes pointed out)

How did those get fixed? Surprisingly easy:

Worked mobility of all joints
Stretched some spots
Strengthened others
Worked out the triggerpoints littered throughout

I’m still waiting for a few things to settle in; that part takes a while. There’ll be a day of blissful pain-free motion — like I’m really moving well — then a day of lots of popping and shifting of the joints, or even a day of reminder of the old chronic aches. Following that will be another day or two of childlike movement that reminds me why I veered off the mainstream and onto this corrective exercise course.

I’m fully convinced most everyone who trains who has regular muscle and skeletal pain and those who get injured often in training, can make themselves feel better by a dedicated joint mobility program and by fixing relatively easy structural imbalances caused by one side being too tight and the other too weak.

It’s a pain in the rear because there aren’t too many people around — the personal trainers and the medical pros — who can do a hands-on analysis and simply tell us what to do. As this field grows enough that we can pop by the clinic and get a personalized exercise and stretching assignment, everyone will be doing it… for sure, because it works, and sometimes fast.

Obviously we can’t fix everything, but I’m 100% sure we can make things better. I’m also absolutely certain this past half-year’s effort has halted any arthritis that may have been developing due to poorly moving joints. In fact, let me give you a hint here: That thoracic spine of yours that doesn’t move very much is a nest for your growing arthritis. Get after it while you can!

My project for July: Are pain-free noisy knees fixable? We used to say if there was no pain, it was no problem; just ignore it. Now I’m not so sure. Maybe it means the knees aren’t tracking as well as they could be. I’ll let you know what I find out, and if somehow these crunchy knees go quiet, I’ll holler out with your fix-it instructions.