Well I'm signed up for Daisy Peel's online Functional Fitness I class!
It starts a week from today. In the meanwhile I'm reading up to
learn more about physical fitness and in my case, perhaps why I keep
having troubles and injuries. Here are some interesting things I've
learned:
A blog on Yoga Journal says that chronic hamstring injuries could be
the result of over-stretching. Well that's a huge AH-HA for me! I've
had chronic hamstring injuries all my life that date back to high
school when I was a cheerleader / dancer. I have always
thought my biggest physical ability was my flexibility so have always
overstretched my hammies thinking I wanted to maintain it. However,
apparently there are tiny muscles that keep getting micro tears when
they are overstretched. Torn hamstrings take 3-6 months to heal
during which time you must be very gentle with them. Crap, somehow
over the weekend I think the one I'm nursing got worse, I think when
bending over pulling weeds in the garden. Be careful eh...that's gonna
be a hard one for me.
Next....static stretching (holding a stretch for 30 seconds or longer
without a warm-up) is bad-bad-bad. I've done that all my life, do'h!
I truly thought it was how you got yourself ready for physical
activity. Not so little cricket!
Dynamic stretching is what you are supposed to do before a workout. I
will say right here and now that rarely, if ever, do I see people
getting ready to run an agility course who precede their run with
dynamic stretching. Yes, I see some jogging around, but don't think
I've ever seen people dynamically stretching. Maybe this blog will do
some good then! Runner's World is a cool site I've recently joined
which has tons of info about how to dynamically stretch, including
videos to show you how.
Again on Runner's World, I found an article on the 10 biggest causes
for runner's injuries. Won't go into all 10 here but some I'm guilty
of are running through pain, not returning to full activity gradually
enough after an injury, and trying to lengthen my stride to go faster.
The last one is like, wow! I think I've even said here that I've
tried lengthening my stride in my last couple of agility trials. What
did I come home with? You got it, more injuries. In my book Speed,
Agility & Quickness, there are lots of exercises to help with shorter,
faster, more agile strides. I watched the DVD that came with the book
over the weekend and let's just say I'm WWWWAAAAYYYY not even close to
the abilities of the slick women athletes demonstrating. Some of the
stuff I can do with good form though, just maybe not as many reps.
Maybe there is hope for this old girl after all :-).
