Reprogramming the "computer"

There's this new fitness place that just opened up by Playmakers called Synergy Fitness, and they're so nice that they are letting all of us use their facilities for free. The other cool thing is they specialize in getting people into their correct alignment by using all of their muscles properly and efficiently. One guy there, Todd, is your stereotypical gym rat - tall, beefy, shaved head and goatee, etc., but he has become an expert on all of this alignment stuff. Their theory is that our brain is wired in certain ways to do all of our movements, and we just accept that as normal. Problem is, most people don't move in the correct way, which means the brain has incorrectly encoded how to move a limb during a certain movement. So what Synergy proposes is to reprogram the brain and get the correct muscles going for any given movement.

You can probably see where this is going. I decided to take advantage of this free opportunity because I'm at the point where I'll pretty much try anything to get myself running again. On Thursday I went in for my first session and we started out with a couple of posture positions to get the muscles activated. It's difficult because you wanna stay on the balls of your feet and squeeze your inner thighs and calves together, while slightly bending your knees, sucking in your stomach, sticking out your chest, and relaxing your shoulders. It sounds like a lot, but I caught on pretty quick...it's almost like a golf swing in the sense that there's so many components to consciously think about. After the posture poses, we did an exaggerated squat and lunge, and it was from those that Todd found my problem. Especially in the lunge when I put one leg behind me, my pelvis tiltled a whole lot toward one side, which essentially means my hip muscles are not being activated and are transferring all the forces down my leg to my knee. It makes sense.

After that, we worked on some of the machines such as leg press, seated bench press, row, and chin up. And we worked on these machines while keeping the same posture techniques that I had just learned in the squat and lunge. After a couple of slow reps on each machine, my muscles started shaking and Todd was saying that's perfectly normal - that's because these particular muscles (the correct ones) aren't used to firing so they're becoming fatigued a bit faster.

All in all, it seemed to have a positive impact on me. Todd is also very curious with how this is going to work with me because I'm his first true runner client that he has worked with. I've got another session scheduled tomorrow afternoon, and he said we may add a little bit to the routine depending on how much "memory" my muscles have retained.

I've definitely been doing a whole bunch of swimming lately as well, which has kept my mind off things a little bit, but I miss doing what I love. Nobody said it would be easy...

Form first

It doesn't seem like I have much going on since school is out for the summer, but work and other things have been keeping me busy....

As I was reading over my last post, I thought of a couple other things I wanted to add in. As we were talking about good running form one day at work, somebody chimed in with "You're told to run, but you're not told how." And it's true...we just do it, and with all due respect to arm/torso motion, nobody really corrects how the feet are hitting the ground. Ok I said I had a couple things, but that's all I could remember...

As for me, I'm not so excited now as I was when I wrote my last post. My knee went back to feeling just like it had been, and now I'm back to the drawing board again. I'm pretty sure I'm gonna be calling a doc and a physical therapist tomorrow to get their opinions on what I should do, so we'll see what happens.

If there's one thing to be excited about, it's this: I was in Chicago last weekend to see my cousin get married, and I was working out one night after dinner. As I was stretching and watching basketball, I looked around and saw all these nice treadmills....and it was just me in the room....and finally I thought, screw it. I ran a mile, trying out my new form. It felt great, and I counted my footfalls per minute three times - 174, 180, 178. I could definitely notice that I was hitting with a greater frequency, and I know that 180 is the number to aim for. Nothing felt bad after that run, so I thought I was on the right track.

I tried it again this past week and my footfalls were about the same, this time I got to a high of 186. And nothing hurt while I was doing it. The problem was, my knee just felt funky about an hour afterward and for the rest of the day as well. So....it's all frustrating, I know I've voiced my concerns about that many times over the past 6 months. Just gotta be more patient I guess....and maybe I won't wait so long to type my next post!

Eureka!

Everybody ready for a happy and non-frustrated post? Brace yourself...

Good news and bad news first though. The bad news is that I didn't call the doc last week like I said I would. Most of it was because I had a million and five things on my mind and I just kind of forgot about it. The good news? I think I finally found a solution to the problem!

Recall a couple of posts ago where I mentioned that a physical therapist recommended something called fibular head mobilizations. I found out more about them a few days later at the injury clinic and it felt like it temporarily did some good. So I had them do it again a couple weeks later and it produced the same result. Basically all they do is get a grip on the head of the fibula and try to loosen the joint a little bit. This past Wednesday I went back in to have them do it again, and the physical therapist noticed that my left fibula moved pretty easily while my right fibula (the injured leg) was pretty tight. After some poking and prodding, she eventually got it loosened up, but mentioned that I'm gonna have to do some work on my own to keep it like that. So I've been doing that every once in a while since then and I actually feel like all of my knee problems are going away. It's just weird that I never thought of something so simple as the fibula as causing these problems. It makes sense though based on where my pain has been.

So that's one thing that's exciting. The other is that I'm ready and eager to undergo a total makeover. Well it's not that extreme...I'm just changing my gait to be more biomechanically efficient because I'm convinced that has played a role in my injury too. The owner of Playmakers practices and also is a firm believer in Chi Running, where the major points are that you strike the ground on the midfoot and also keep your center of gravity over your legs. During these injury clinics on Wednesday nights, he's there to promote Chi Running/good form and also has one of the other employees (the one who was in the last Olympics, so obviously he runs with good form too) help educate customers on what good form looks like. Usually I work on those nights, so I've been kind of watching them while I'm not with a customer and I've absorbed a lot of good info. Sometimes I have to go to the back to get a shoe or something, so I jog back there and lately I've been kind of practicing this new and improved gait, and I think I'm really getting used to it. A couple of days ago, we were already closed and just waiting for a couple customers to finish with their shopping, so me and my coworker were dicking around on the treadmill where we can videotape and analyze someone's gait. I was curious to see what I looked like, so I did two tapings - one with the gait I've known and "loved" for so long, and one with the new technique. Once I did that, I looked at them side by side and could REALLY see a difference - I wasn't putting any strain on my legs by landing on my heel and I was also hitting the ground at a greater frequency. I called Grant over (the olympic guy) and asked him what he thought, and he said that my new gait is pretty much exactly what he preaches to the customers. And by looking at the two pictures here, you can see how I've been landing on the heel and putting that strain on other parts of my leg, especially my knee.

Sooooooo all in all, I've definitely been feeling better. That's what keeping a positive outlook does for you. I've still been swimming and doing my exercises and stretching, and I'm not about to rush back into things either - I'm gonna start on the elliptical and bike and then work my way from there. I've been out far too long to set myself back even further, but I'm still gonna wait a few days to start all that...just to make sure.