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...