Fitness Training 27FEB18

I have started to write about fitness and my back problems several times. Always there was a nagging shadow of pain that continued to follow me.

My Provision Living trainers could make we feel real good, but progress on the back pain was leveling out again. I signed up the in-house physical therapist and a chiropractor. Again progress was great and then slowed.

Last Tuesday, a week ago [a month ago!], the chiropractor “graduated” me down to one session a week. He also found and treated two trigger points near my shoulder blades.  Now my shoulders are free to rock back and forth.

I also have an exercise shared between the physical therapist and the chiropractor. Stand with your back against a wall. Hold your hands, with their backs against the wall, and your arms straight by your sides. Now “snow angel” with the back of your hands remaining against the wall.

Start

Several Days Later

 I could not even get my arms and hands above my shoulders, to start!! Just move my hands away from the wall a few inches and there is no problem raising them up to where my hands can meet.

It took the physical therapist to train me to stand properly while doing this exercise. She could do this, but I needed to learn to do it properly on my own.

For most of two years now, I have been slowly learning to recognize muscle groups that I have had no sense of feeling. How can I do what is called for if I cannot feel what is going on? [muscle cells do not have sensory cells like on your skine.]

“Stand up straight,” but without over compensating!!! “Relax,” and really relax!!! Doing things wrong does not improve things.

It was failure to do those two things that I now know were the basis for my failure to progress after a few weeks of many exercises I learned from the Internet and the Provision Living fitness classes. I plan to write more on the details later.

Yesterday we went for a walk at 3:00 instead of working in the Fitness Center. The fitness director said, “Better sit on the bench,” when he noticed, but I had not, that my shoulders were bending over.

I knew my back had started hurting. He knew that a short rest reversed this so if I carefully stood up “straight” I could walk on without pain for some period of time and distance.

A bit farther, “You are holding your right arm out. Relax it.” And farther on, the residual back pain began to fade away. I need to walk more outside, away from all the stuff in the air in the building?

We visited the edge of the milkweed plantings on the Monarch Butterfly Sanctuary, that borders the walking park. Soon I will get lots of exercise again spraying and cutting weeds.

The chiropractor has loosened up my joints and relaxed muscle trigger points so the physical therapist can help retrain my muscles that the fitness director can strengthen and coordinate for better balance.

Basically I have finally experienced being at the point where I should be, when under their direct attention. Now to practice, practice, and practice until this becomes a habit, muscle memory; or my conscious attention remains on the job until I master the fine art of walking correctly.

Conscious attention costs a lot less than building muscle memory in 60-minute gentle therapy sessions.

[I have been very busy organizing people needed to eliminate third hand tobacco smoke exposure in memory care. I had a productive one-hour meeting with the executive vice president Thursday.]