Pathetic excuse I’m sure, but I’ve been inspired by a question from Laura on last Thursday’s post.  Laura was wondering what my rolling routine is.

Self massage – the basic principles

Self massage can be a vital tool in anybody’s box, whether they are the immobile desk-job worker who never does any exercise or a hard-training athlete.  The reality in fact is that the person with the desk job will probably have far worse knots than the athlete but may be unaware of them because they don’t use the knotted muscles anyway.  Those of us with desk jobs who also want to be active have the worst of both worlds – knots building up from the constant sitting and then trying to use those same muscles with resultant injuries if the knots hamper movement.

If you don’t have plenty of money to pay for a masseuse then DIY is your only option.  Of the DIY options I’ve written about before the most common (and possibly most effective) is using balls, rollers and sticks in order to use your body weight and push the object into the knot.

Tools of doom!

For some handy resources on self-massage I’ve got a couple of old posts for you:

• Self-massage toolkit: what to include in it
• Using a self-massage toolkit
• Injuries and basic anatomy: includes some handy references on books you can use to learn which muscles are where.

Fitting self-massage into a busy life – getting it done

I can only speak from my personal experience here but the important way of doing this is to make it impossible to miss it out.   Make a space in a part of your daily routine that is never missed.

I tried adding it into my bedtime routine but that was too haphazard.  I’d kidded myself that I had a stable bedtime routine, but I didn’t.  After numerous weeks of missed rolling sessions I found a new space in my routine.  Mornings are the same every day in the week – I tried putting it in after my shower (get up, brush my teeth, get washed, weigh myself, get dressed, roll, walk downstairs) but even that didn’t work when I was doing some sort of sporting activity in the morning which resulted in me not showering first.

After a bit of trial and error (and irritation at the bits of white carpet on my black work jumper) I found the perfect space.  As soon as I get up, before I even go to the bathroom.  My morning routine now looks like this:

• Stumble out of bed to the upstairs landing grasping my big-face alarm clock so that I don’t lose track of time
• Roll for 15 minutes
• Head back to the bathroom to brush my teeth, shower and weigh in
• Dress and head downstairs for the day

I give my violin pupils basic exercises sometimes too (things like band pull aparts) and I always suggest that they do it as soon as they stand up out of bed or just before they put the light out at the end of the day.  It seems to work for them.

Fitting self-massage into a busy life – keeping it brief

The other key is to keep it brief.  You’ll never fit in a half hour every day if you’re busy but there will be a length of time you can spare, perhaps 10 or 15 minutes.

Clearly you cannot get through the whole of your body effectively in 15 minutes so you need to focus on what is important.  Where do you have tightness at the moment?  Where are you prone to regular knots?  If I’m on holiday I’ll do the whole lot, but I’m focused on damage limitation during a working week.

The desk job gives me permanent upper body problems and there are certain muscles there which impact on my lifting with even a hint of a knot in them.  In particular I struggle with:

• Tight pecs
• Large knots in my traps (from temporary desk/chair combinations where the keyboard is too high for me)
• Rotator cuffs, especially where they cross over into the upper arm
• Lats – knots in these impact on most fo my lifts.

So my morning routine focuses on these unless I have knots elsewhere when I will swap the least problematic of these for the new knot until I’m back in shape.  It has a smooth pattern, something like this:

• 5 mins: Lie on my front: Right pec, left pec
• 5 mins: Start on my left side with the ball at the bottom of my lat, slowly moving the ball up, concentrating on the rotator cuff crossover point and then moving it in along the trap towards my neck.  If I’ve got rhomboid problems I’ll start heading down the centre of my back a little too.
• 5 mins: Cross over the spine and do my right side in the reverse order to my left, although sometimes I’ll take the ball out and do my right side in the same order as my left.

Give yourself an enjoyable excuse

This is my naughty secret.

There are days when I struggle to get out of bed, but I have no time in my life to read books either, and I love books.  So I have mastered the art of reading novels while rolling, holding the book open with the non-massaging side.  I use part of my brain to read while part of me stays focused on the pain and senses in my body.

Every morning I want to get back to my gripping novel, knowing that I have to stop exactly 15 minutes later or I’ll impact on Chris’s morning routine.  So I want to get out there and roll.  I want to get to that book.  I want to know what’s going to happen next.

 *****

So what do you think?  Can you manage a bit of daily rolling without any excuses?

Related posts:

1. Using a self-massage toolkit
2. Self-massage toolkit
3. The importance of soft tissue work

I am working to get back up to speed post holiday but it really isn’t proving easy.  I think that most of my problems have been caused by my diet.  Adjusting back after the fortnight on a Swiss Alpine diet has left me weak, seeing stars and sometimes feeling physically queasy.  I’ll write about it in more detail later this week.

A foolish plan

After putting it off for as long as I dared, I ventured into the gym on Thursday – 3 weeks after I was last in there.  Last time I went hiking I did a physically demanding walk but was back in the gym about 1.5 weeks after my previous workout.  I went back in almost at the numbers I left. 

Foolishly I decided that any messages my body was sending me this time were simply the fact that I’d forgotten what a the heavy weights felt like and pushed myself to the weight I was expecting to be working with (while aiming for a smaller set/rep scheme.  I didn’t give it the respect of believing that nearly 4 weeks without a heavy workout and instead spending two of those weeks out on the hill stripping muscle off would have a significant impact.

I had decided to do RDLs since I find those physically and neurologically easier than back squats – having spent 4 days back in the office I wasn’t ready for either the feel of the weight at the top of my spine or the complications of potential mobility issues.  RDLs – nice and easy, can’t go wrong.  Hmmmm…

Real life kicks in

I was aiming for 95kg.  By 70kg on my warm up the weight was feeling heavy and, more importantly, I was really struggling to keep my lats held down in position.  If I tried to re-breathe after taking the weight off the rack I would lose the slight control I had over my lats and have to rack it.  Not good news, but did I listen?  Not a chance.  So I battled through several doubles and a few singles, despite feeling my lower back really struggling to avoid popping out (and failing to prevent it several times) as I strained against the weight at the bottom of the movement.

Trying to do kettlebell overhead presses after the RDLs I potentially found the issue.  I couldn’t get my arm above my head and, following some lat stretches, this problem seemed much better.  Tight lats?  Unable to control my lats?  Any connection?

Dealing with the fall-out

I wish I had listened to my body.  Writing this on Saturday I’m still a mess.

We’re now two days later and my rotator cuffs appear to have taken the brunt of the RDLs in place of my lats and are subsequently inflamed.  The inflammation covers the whole length of the muscle group from the ends in my upper arm right through to my neck.  I feel like I’ve got a stiff neck and even the lightest touch with my fingers along my shoulders or upper arms can make me yelp with the pain.  I’ve rolled each morning, gritting my teeth against the pain, and found I can give myself some extra range of movement for about 5 minutes, but this is now going to be a very long and slow road to recovery.  My lower back isn’t in the best shape either now…

On the plus side, I did manage 5 (not the 6 I should have managed) sets of 4 reps with 120kg on my hip thrusts and the first few reps of each set weren’t too bad.  Only 10kg lost there then.  That’s possibly the best glute strength retention I’ve ever seen after a multi-day hike.

Were the mountains worth it? I think so.

Planning for the future

I had been planning on easing up on my workouts, reducing their size fractionally and dropping down to 2 workouts a week for the rest of the year – I’ve got a lot of other things on my plate for the remainder of 2011 and the blog and keeping workouts aggressively progressive (rather than holding my current progress where it has got to) are the two areas I can most easily lighten up.  However, I need to fix this new problem as my urgent priority.  So for the next few weeks, this isn’t going to be the usual structured post.  Instead it will be a short piece summarising how I’m doing on getting back to where I should (and would like) to be and my plan for the next week.

Wish me luck!

*****

Plan for this week

Workout 1: 

• Back squat: 80-90% of my previous working weight, 78kg, depending on how warm up feels – 8×2 or, if it feels good, 8×3
• RDL: 70-80% of my previous working weight, 95kg – 8×2 or 8×3
• Kettlebell overhead press: 12kg – 8×2
• Pull ups:  No weight, 1 set, as many reps as I can do

Workout 2:

Either the same as workout 1, although progressive, or the workout below:

• RDLs: 80-90% of my previous working weight, 95kg – 8×2 or 8×3
• Kettlebell overhead press: 12kg – 8×3
• Hip thrusts: 120kg – 6×4 (let’s nail it this time).
• Pull ups:  No weight, 1 set, as many reps as I can do.

Related posts:

1. Powerlifting progress 2011: week twenty-three
2. Powerlifting progress 2011: week twenty-two
3. Powerlifting progress 2011: week twenty-four

2010 proved to be the year when I really nailed my hip mobility, subsequently made massive increases on my squat and started to get a grip on the real weaknesses in my lifts (such as shoulder stability on my bench press). 

For 2011 my focus is on enhancing the figure which I worked hard on towards the end of 2010 and on getting my deadlift past the national qualifying standards.  I’ll also carry on hammering away at my shoulder stability issues with the intention of making bench press the lift of 2012.  Of course, I won’t abandon my squat.

I’m making a lot of use of Hepburn routines this year, giving me slower but steadier progress and trying to void my nemesis of mental burn-out.  For the main exercises it keeps me on the same weight for 9 workouts while I add 1 rep per workout from 8×2 to 8×3, immediately followed by a lighter back-off workout (3×6 rising to 3×9).  After 9 weeks I put the weight up by a slightly bigger step than I would have used when putting the weight up every workout.  It’s really reducing the mental exhaustion from having a weight increase at every session.

I’m recording my progress in this series: powerlifting progress.  It is serving as a journal and makes me a bit more accountable to my goals. 

This week

This was a difficult week.  I’ve been slowly becoming aware of a dull pain in my middle back on the right side – this week it reached an unbearable level, making stabalising my core and back for squatting uncomfortable and for Pendlay Rows unbearable.  It’s been creeping up on me over the last few weeks and I’m suspicious that it has been mostly aggravated by twisting movements with weights. 

My overhead press singles have been more like bent over presses with the effort of the new weight, with a risk of twist included.  However, I’ve been as careful as possible.  The more problem areas are my activity-specific cardio work (walking fast uphill on the treadmill with weights slung about me) which has been aggravating my back as I deload the dumbbells slung diagonally across my body, and getting the loaded rucksack on and off my back for my press ups.

At any other time I would consider a week of full rest and careful back rolling to recover, but I am off to the Alps in three weeks when I will then have two weeks out of the gym while I walk.  As such I can’t really afford to miss a week right now.  Instead, I am going to get a weighted vest as soon as possible (to reduce the twisting with weight while I put the backpack for my press ups) and drop the weight of my overhead press, trying doubles instead of singles with more upright form and building the doubles back up to 20kg.

It should take the pressure off my back and that, coupled with rolling should give me a chance to heal a little before my holiday while keeping my workouts on track.

Deadlift

Action plan

• Maintain – leg strength and hip mobility
• Develop – ab strength and lower back strength

Progress this week

For my deadlifts, I am very much sold on the article written by Joe Mills in 1975 which I read on Tight Tan Slacks of Dezso Ban last year.  This explained that the old time strongmen didn’t deadlift to improve their deadlift but instead increased deadlift strength through assistance exercises (eg. Olympic lifts, Good Mornings). 

The weakness in my deadlift was my lower back which “popped out” as soon as I got near a maximum effort lift.  For the last few months of 2010 I concentrated on Good Mornings which gave some improvement.  I am now spending 2011 working with Romanian Deadlifts (RDLs) to see if I can further improve my lower back strength.

I’m halfway through 90kg now and it’s still going well.  I’m almost eager for the day I make it to 100kg!

Squat

Action plan

• Maintain – hip mobility and glute strength
• Develop – ab and lower back strength

Progress this week

I’m quite happy to believe that the best way to improve my squat is to squat.  The abs and lower back strength comes partly from the squatting and the lower back strength will also be helped by the assistance exercises that I do for deadlift.

A set of three reps with 78kg was tough, especially with the added back pain, but I’m hoping I can sort the back pain out and, despite the pain, I did manage a full squat workout without any missed reps.

Bench

Action plan

• Maintain – technique
• Develop – scapular stability and thoracic mobility

 Progress this week

My upper body strength is not the limiting factor on my bench press at the moment.  It’s my shoulder stability.  So I am only doing assistance exercises on my upper body and the upper body is never taking the position of primary exercise in my workouts.  That said, problems with putting the weight up on my row and overhead press early in the year meant I’m trying a five set Hepburn cycle and singles Hepburn for the pull and push (supersetting) after the squat.  After RDLs I am pursuing a 3×5 system with pull ups and press ups (supersetting).

Here’s where I was by the end of this week:

• RDL day:  Weighted pull up (6.25kg – 3×4, just like that, an extra rep on every set), weighted press up (17kg – 3×3, a solid new start)
• Squat day:  Pendlay row (57kg – 5×2), one-arm dumbbell overhead press (20kg – 5 singles)

Figure development

My fat-stripping session at the end of 2010 revealed that my glutes were tiny, despite having a huge amount of strength (I was doing 5 sets of 4 reps hip thrusts with 102kg, doing a good 4-5 second hold at the top each time).  For 2011 I am therefore on a mission to get some serious hypertrophy in my glutes while retaining strength.

120kg was completed.  Thank goodness!  I wonder what my next target will be?  Perhaps 136kg which would be 300lbs.

Related posts:

1. Powerlifting progress 2011: week twenty
2. Powerlifting progress 2011: week twenty-one
3. Powerlifting progress 2011: week twenty-two

I’ve written about exercise and the menstrual cycle before, in particular about matching periodisation with your cycle and how my cycle can interact poorly with exercise.

Why Hepburn has helped me analyse my menstrual cycle

The benefit of the Hepburn routine has been that it has given me a really good opportunity since the start of the year to watch the true impact of my menstrual cycle on my performance. 

Previously, when I was putting the weight up by 1kg or 2kg each session and doing the same set/rep scheme, there was no way of knowing when I failed in a workout whether it was that the new weight was too heavy or I was just weak due to external factors (eg. menstrual cycle, too little recovery/sleep, poor diet etc).  Now I’m doing the same weight each time, just adding a rep.  Therefore if I can’t at least match my previous workout I know that something is definitely wrong with the external factors.

Interestingly I’ve found it reasonably easy to pin down which has been the problem factor each time because there is rarely more than one thing which has gone wrong in the previous couple of days (and when there is more than one thing then my workout is almost certainly an “interesting” and unpleasant experience).

Basic observations

Last year I was starting to think that I was getting somewhere in not being so heavily affected by my menstrual cycle, and perhaps that is right and I am just noticing it more now because I have had elevated stress levels for the last few months.  However, I am aware that this is reflecting patterns I had noticed previously and that, even when I perform at my best, there is still a slight skew to the pattern below.

To explain it all I’m going to avoid using the technical names for the different parts of the cycle.  If you studied the cycle properly in biology at school then you probably learned them, but I didn’t.  Instead I was taught them in something called “Health and Social Education” (mostly SexEd) and since there were no exams for that, I promptly forgot them.  So in case you also don’t know them, I’m referring to the cycle with reference to “P” where P is the day you start to bleed.

• P minus one or two days:  I am definitely at my strongest on these two days.  I can throw any heavy exercise at myself and I will breeze through it (unless I’m full of knots).
• P day:  I am weak as a baby this day.  All hell breaks loose if I have to do a workout since I feel like my joints are all slightly disconnected.
• P plus one to four days:  My strength gradually returns, increasing exponentially until I am back to normal form.

Weak as a baby when I've got my period

A couple of examples

Thanks to being on the contraceptive pill (a bit of a discussion point in itself, but since this is a constant factor throughout I have to assume that it makes no relative difference to these observations) I know that my period should always start on a Sunday.  These days it seems to be starting early or mid morning on Sundays.

Two months ago

I was doing back squats on a Saturday, the day before my period began.  I stormed through my workout and felt like I could rule the world. 

Monday came and I made it through my RDL workout, which I find slightly easier on my body than my back squat workout, although my lower back felt a bit sore by the end which was unusual.

Wednesday arrived and I was on back squats again.  I felt confident having stormed my previous workout but this time was all different.  It didn’t feel really tough but it didn’t feel easy – no longer was I flying through every rep with an explosive thrust to my style and I subsequently felt disappointed with my performance.

In this situation the additional strength on the Saturday set my expectations too high for the next back squat workout.  Something I will keep an eye out for next time.

One month ago

I was doing back squats on a Sunday, the day my period began.  Really I should have been sensible and moved it to Monday but I didn’t feel too weak when I woke up.  It was a completely different story with the bar on my back though and every rep was a grind, which shouldn’t happen on Hepburn.  Interestingly my upper body was good but I had to stop my hip thrusts halfway through the exercise.

Tuesday’s RDLs weren’t too bad.  With the extra day out from my period I didn’t have the lower back pain and I completed twelve sets of hip thrusts.  I probably managed my expectations a little better too.

Friday I crept into the gym.  My performance on the Sunday had knocked all the stuffing out of me and I was terrified of my back squats.  However, the reps were good and I didn’t feel like I would buckle under the weight.

Some specific observations

Something I did want to draw attention to was the way this only heavily impacted on my lower body exercises and specifically on my posterior chain.  This was particularly noticeable in the fact that I actually had to abandon my hip thrusts last month having already used my glutes to their maximum capability for my back squats.

It also seems to affect my squatting more than my RDLs.  This may be a function of other issues with my back squat weight and rest period, which I set out in my Hepburn article) but I am also suspicious that it has something to do with the fact that the weight is sat at the top of the spine for the back squat, with the lats playing a slightly less protective role for the spine than they play in the RDL.  I certainly become hyper-aware of the stress on my core/lower back of standing with the weight on my back.

I am not alone in this.  Alli McKee noted on one of my old posts that she also noticed a weakness in her core when she is around the time of her cycle.  Similarly, even when I wasn’t on Hepburn I was particularly aware of the weakness on exercises which relied on my core.

Have you been aware of a similar link between your performance in the gym and your menstrual cycle?  What have your experiences been?

Related posts:

1. Blog-watch: interaction of diet and exercise with the menstrual cycle – part two
2. Blog-watch: interaction of diet and exercise with the menstrual cycle – part one
3. Lessons learned: exercise and the menstrual cycle

What is soft tissue work?

Soft tissue work most often is used to refer to massage and other direct work done on the muscles to release knots.  Eliminating knots is important for keeping mobile:

• A knot can cause the muscle it is in to shorten.  Imagine stretching an elastic band where a section in the middle has perished and hardened up.  The hard section won’t stretch and as a result the overall length of the stretched band will be shorter than a similar sized band with no hard sections in it.
• Shortened muscles can pull joints out of alignment resulting in debilitating injury and pain.
• Knots can block or prevent you from completing exercises correctly by turning off muscles (as a self-protection mechanism to prevent further injury) or by impacting your range of movement due to shortened muscles.

Is it worthwhile?

I wouldn’t have mentioned this, but while I am a devotee to soft tissue work (when I remember and have issues), there are those with alternative views.  One of those is Mike Nelson and you can read about his issues with foam rolling in the article “Get off the Foam Roller”.  He provided Chris Beardsley with a shorter summary during an interview.

Ways to do soft tissue work

1.  Find a masseuse

One of the simplest, but definitely not the cheapest, ways of doing soft tissue work is to get someone else to do it for you. 

At the top end of the scale are specialist masseurs, in particular sports massage therapists or a similar masseur who specialises in your activity.  As a teenager I went to see someone who specialised in working on musicians as the problems I had at the time where caused by playing the violin. 

If you are looking for a sports massage therapist in the UK then an excellent starting point would be the London School of Sport and Remedial Massage (LSSM).  This is a recognised body with a high standard specialist qualification – there’s a directory of qualified practitioners on their website.  However, there are other sports massage qualifications so it is worth checking out whether there is someone working at your local Physio clinic.

Be warned that even once you’ve found a sports massage practitioner you’ll eventually have to find a new one.  I was once told that a sports masseuse has about 8-10 years of working life in them before their thumbs get arthritic from all the digging into people’s knots.

2.  Self massage with equipment

It doesn’t need to cost much to put together a collection of different size and hardness of balls and rollers for self massage.  You can pay out lots of money for bits of equipment to help you with this but there’s no need to get so complex.  While we’ve found it a worthwhile investment to purchase a foam roller, the rest of our self-massage kit is homemade or involves the sorts of balls you can buy quite cheaply from a budget sports shop or even, in some cases, a cheap hypermarket.

You can read all about the self-massage kit that we put together on a post I wrote some time ago.  The only thing we have added to that kit since then is a short length of plastic waste pipe, about 6 inches long, which either serves as a lightweight portable roller for our legs when we are on a walking holiday or which snugly fits a golf ball in the end to help get at bits of the pec muscles.

Some of our self-massage kit

The art is to find the best contortions to bend yourself into so that you can then really sink the hard object into the knots and to be persistent in finding those knots.  Different implements are good for different knots and muscles.

3.  Self massage without equipment

While this is certainly the cheapest method is, quite possibly, the hardest way to go about soft tissue work.  You need a will of iron and a certain amount of enjoyment of self-torture to really achieve your goal.  Strong thumbs and double jointedness may be necessary too.

Simply put, find the knot, dig your thumbs in and try not to let up on the pressure as the pain builds.  Of course that can get a bit complicated when the knot is in the middle of your back and you can’t reach it.  In that situation you may need to borrow a good friend (who you’ll forgive later) and provide directions to the location of the knot and the angle and pressure to apply (without training they may well not be able to feel it).

So that’s it for my reminder about soft tissue work.  I’ll be looking for somewhere in my daily routine to fit in soft tissue work and trying not to avoid it going forwards!  Do you do regular soft tissue work and do you have any other methods you use?

Related posts:

1. Self massage for a busy life
2. Work-Life balance
3. Lessons learned: regular physical assessment

Loving my Vibram FiveFingers

Anyway, there have been a few more posts and articles which hit my Google Reader RSS feed in the last couple of months about foot health, so I thought I’d collate them together for you to read.

• I’m going to start with something that I’m not entirely sure about.  I don’t really suffer from flat feet, although I was given special orthopaedics to put in my shoes for a few years when I was about seven or eight years old.  However, this is an article about short-foot posture.  It’s a method for teaching the foot to shorten the arch, therefore reducing problems of flat feet.  Interesting stuff and probably worth looking into if flat feet is a problem for you.
• I really loved the pictorial guide from Matt Metzgar showing just what wearing “normal” shoes does to our feet.  I’m sure you’ve all seen those old ladies who have enormous bunions and twisted feet that are so mangled that they barely fit into soft cloth shoes.  However, it really hammers home the message when you see the feet of a habitually barefoot person from 1905 and those of a three year old.  In both cases the foot is a completely different shape to the shape we grow to associate with a bare foot.
• Charlie Weingroff did an interesting article with some suggestions on how to start off barefoot to help strengthen knees and feet.  It’s got some interesting exercise recommendations although I have to admit that I was surprised to see him commenting on ideally wanting to see the great Arnie with a bit more foot arch.  That’s a bold statement.
• I know I’m looking at foot health, but I thought I would balance this post out a bit.  I spend all my time training out in the gym with bare feet (or wearing Vibrams now, to protect my feet from our very cold bare concrete floor) but I know that some people train in public gyms where you just wouldn’t be allowed to get away with Vibrams or bare feet.  Some people therefore end up in trainers (although there are plenty of flatter and wider-fitting alternatives).  An article in Bodybuilding.com is principally aimed at convincing those who currently wear running shoes to lift to swap to weightlifting shoes.  It’s got some interesting points in the article, although I can’t say that I completely agree with all of them.  However, if you find yourself in the predicament of using a gym which is so strict then do give the comments in this article some serious thought.
• Christopher McDougall is best known for writing the book Born to Run.  He recently disclosed his top four running tips of which the first one out of the bag (although not his top tip) is to get barefoot.  That said, point two is about learning new footstrikes which is something that you will need to do if your move from shod to unshod running too.
• Finally, if you are wearing Vibrams to improve your foot health then you may have problems with the Vibrams getting very smelly.  Mine make it into the weekly wash-cycle, but if that doesn’t get rid of the smell for you then Darryl on The Fitness Explorer did a great “recipe” for a natural deodorising wash for Vibrams.

So there you have it.  Not too many articles but still a few particularly interesting bits which I hope you find of interest.  Have you seen anything interesting on the internet recently about foot health and barefoot life?  If so, do let me know.

Related posts:

1. Blog-watch: barefoot health
2. Blog-watch: exercise for mental health and brain development
3. Blog-watch: barefoot running update

Today I’m going to briefly look at an example of how poor thoracic mobility can specifically have an adverse impact on powerlifting and then I’m going to work through some common stretches designed to address the problem.

The impact of poor thoracic mobility on powerlifting

The other week I found myself in the gym with a problem on my hands.  I’d already established that I didn’t have the scapular mobility or stability to bench press so I wasn’t even trying to press.  But then I came to my beloved full squat.

I’ve been so pleased to gradually improve my hip mobility until I could get down below parallel but suddenly I couldn’t get to parallel again.  Testing my hip mobility showed this wasn’t the problem but I knew from the soreness quickly developing across my upper back that the problem was with my thoracic spine.

As I dropped into a squat position I had two options open to me: allow my lumbar region to curve outwards to enable me to keep the weight in the correct place over the centre of mass with my chest up, because I was forcing my thoracic spine to a position that was an excessive movement away from its usual centre position; or lean forwards and drift my knees forwards to cope with this new centre of mass.

Both created excessive “tucking” to the movement and in addition the first left me with a sore lower back and the second caused knee pain.  The answer was to stop squatting and get to work to create some thoracic mobility.

I can forget about squatting deeply for a while

How to improve thoracic mobility

There is a simple test involving lying on your back on the floor with your knees bent (so your feet are flat on the floor) and raising your arms up until they rest on the floor above your head while ensuring your lower back never leaves the floor.  This not only tests how mobile your thoracic spine is but can also be used as a gentle stretch to start to build up some mobility.  You’ll find more descriptions of this test with photos on a few of the links which follow.

However, even if testing shows a good amount of thoracic spine mobility it’s never a bad idea to keep working on it.  Especially since I’ve now found how quickly it can stiffen up again.

There seem to be a few key exercises that everyone recommends:

• Stretching (either static or through repeated crunch-movements) over a foam roller or a pair of tennis balls strapped together.  I prefer to do this movement off the top step of the stairs because I find that if thoracic mobility is too poor the lumbar spine compensates with this stretch, even if you are trying to stop it.  Off the top of the stairs you can feel the floor in contact with your lumbar spine at all times to help you keep track of this.  The photos below, courtesy of Chris Beardsley at Chris Beardsley’s Garage Gym, show these two stretches.
  

  Thoracic extension with a foam roller - top position

  

  Thoracic extension with a foam roller - bottom position

  

  Thoracic extension with two tennis balls - top position

  

  Thoracic extension with two tennis balls - bottom position

• Side lying rotations.  Pavel Tsatsouline, of Dragondoor, suggests enhancing these by holding a kettlebell in the extended arm that is moving over.  This adds some weight to help stretch the arm back but be careful not to pick a kettlebell that is too heavy or you’ll pull the arm out of the socket (or just flip over sideways).
• Quadruped rotations
• High step rotations – also good for building up some glute strength!

Get mobilised

I’ve now got a daily program of mobility exercises designed to slowly get some movement back into my thoracic spine while also strengthening the lower traps and rhomboids to get them pulling everything back (although that is less of a problem for me).  Hopefully this post has given you some ideas of things that you may want to try.

If you’ve come across other stretches to improve thoracic mobility I would be really interested to hear about them.

Related posts:

1. Lessons learned: thoracic spine mobility (part 1)
2. Lessons learned this week: developing mobility drills
3. Lessons learned this week: Mobility drills

The reason for the inverted commas is that I was walking over half of the UK’s coast-to-coast.  This is a 192 mile (307km) walk from St Bees on the west cost to Robin Hoods Bay on the east coast, crossing several of our National Parks enroute (specifically, the Lake District, the Penines part of the Yorkshire Dales and the Cumbrian Hills part of the North Yorkshire Moors).  In my holidays from my desk job I review routecards for a self-guiding walking holiday company, making sure they are accurate.  This week saw us trekking from Kirkby Stephen on the west side of the Penines to Robin Hoods Bay.  111 miles (177km) later we were both a bit footsore and had learned a few important primal things about our diet and our footwear.  I’m going to save those for a separate post. 

This is that later post, before I forget all the things I had learned.  In fact, it’s two posts so apologies to anyone who is a fan of my blog-watch posts and waits with baited breath for them to arrive every Thursday because tomorrow is part two. 

What is a foot? 

Did you know that there are 26 bones and 19 major muscles in the ankle and foot? 

The likelihood is that you didn’t unless you also read Chris’s blog, Chris Beardsley’s Garage Gym, where he has been charting his learning from his personal training course, or you have some sort of anatomy training of your own (whether through personal training training (!), medical training or some other desire to know all about the muscles and bones of the human body).  The benefit of living with someone who is learning all of this is that I just get the selected interesting bits, or the bits that are relevant to me at the time. 

Last week, as I was hobbling in my boots along a particularly cruel 4 mile section of road walking at the end of a day Chris came out with the nugget of knowledge that we actually have more than one joint in the ankle and foot complex.  The one everyone knows about is the talocrural joint (beween the talus, the tibia and the fibula).  The others are the subtalar and transverse tarsal joints.  My sketchy memory of what he was saying (as remembered through the haze of pain screaming up at me from my feet) was that these lower joints are near the area of the foot which makes the arch.  

My poor feet may never forgive me

Why do I care about secondary ankle joints? 

It made sense when I thought about it (and think about it I did, since it distracted me from the pain).  

If you look at most quadrupeds (eg. horses and dogs), they do actually bend significantly in two areas of the “foot” to get full functional movement, with the part that touches the ground generally or always being the toes, depending on the animal.  In the case of the horse, they only use the toes now and this has(long since hardened into a single nail which is the hoof.  

Similarly, one of the first things I noticed when wearing my Vibrams on long walks was that on particularly hard and knobbly surfaces (like the gravelled and rocky road that we take to reach our village from the fields) or when going downhill I instantly moved to a toe-first placement. 

Now picture this movement with a big sturdy boot on.  Flex at that point of the foot is suddenly limited and you find that, by preference, you continue walking heel-toe almost all the time.  Simply because the boot doesn’t properly allow you to fully flex at that second joint. 

How I learned my lesson 

The upshot was that the sole of my foot was one big web of knots within days, despite having not had this problem for several months and especially not since we got the Vibrams.  

The knots were only the start of it though.  Something that invariably accompanies long multi-day walks is the stinging in the soles of the feet.  This has happened to us every time we’ve done these bigger trips and invariably leaves us doing deals towards the end of the day on the last few days.  Deals like “we’ll just walk for half hour and then have 15 minutes rest – we should get to our preferred sleeping site within about four stints like that” or “lets get round this corner and see if we can see tonight’s wood before we rest our feet for another 10 minutes” (when we’ve only been walking for about 10 minutes). 

Previously, we have always put this searing pain down to the continuous battering of ground against foot sole, but can you see our nomadic ancestors doing these sorts of deals?  Do chimps stop hunting for a few days because their feet hurt?  Perhaps it’s true, but somehow I doubt it.  

It can’t be good for us 

Somehow, alarm bells were going off in our heads.  This level of pain couldn’t be good for us.  Every bio-sensitivity study that has been done suggests that people thrive when they listen to their bodies and our bodies were, quite literally, forcing us to either stop walking or hobble in ways that meant that hips and knees quickly started hurting from compensation movements. 

So we wondered if this pain, in addition to the knots, would be lessened by being able to use the foot properly.  

We would no longer endlessly be bashing the same few touch-points of our feet with every pounding step and the foot could react differently dependent on the different surfaces and angles that we’re walking on.  After all, with that many bones and muscles in the foot it surely can’t be right that day after day for 7 days I should have the exact same tiny pressure points with the “ground” inside my boot and feel that there are parts of my foot that are restricted from being used. 

Let the human experimentation begin 

It’s currently still speculation, but we’ve set ourselves the challenge of learning to walk big distances (bigger than the 12 miles we’ve already done in Vibrams) on consecutive days with a pack on our back in time for one of our big walks over the winter months.  

Once we’ve done that I’ll let you know if the horrendous pain was significantly lessened.  If it is then it is likely that the answer is that if we learn to use our feet properly then we don’t need to protect them in such big walking boots. 

Tomorrow’s lesson is all about our diet and primal endurance.

Related posts:

1. Lessons learned: primal endurance diet
2. Lessons learned: low-carb diet for endurance exercise
3. Lessons learned this week: incontinence

The reason for the inverted commas is that I was walking over half of the UK’s coast-to-coast.  This is a 192 mile (307km) walk from St Bees on the west cost to Robin Hoods Bay on the east coast, crossing several of our National Parks enroute (specifically, the Lake District, the Penines part of the Yorkshire Dales and the Cumbrian Hills part of the North Yorkshire Moors).  In my holidays from my desk job I review routecards for a self-guiding walking holiday company, making sure they are accurate.  This week saw us trekking from Kirkby Stephen on the west side of the Penines to Robin Hoods Bay.  111 miles (177km) later we were both a bit footsore and had learned a few important primal things about our diet and our footwear.  I’m going to save those for a separate post.

While we were generally wild-camping for the trip, for one night in the middle we stayed in a delightful pub in the village of Danby Wiske to get clean.  Well, the real reason is that we weren’t sure we’d be able to find somewhere to sleep out.  It was in the middle of a long stretch of agricultural land between the Dales and the Moors where we didn’t think we’d be in with much luck finding anywhere to sleep without being trampled by cows, eaten by dogs or shot by local farmers (or at least being asked to move on numerous times by angry-faced people).  However, the two very long and warm showers and the night in a soft bed without spiders, beetles and woodlice walking across my face did make a welcome change.

While at the pub, I asked Chris if he would do some massage on the soft tissue in my back and shoulders which had been causing me grief over the first few days.  His massage and some further investigation through various stretches, activation exercises and movements have given me some food for thought and resulted in a complete rewrite of my upper body workout, starting with immediate effect.

Issue #1 – Improper use of spinal erectors and abs for core stability

When you walk all day, you inevitably push muscles to their limit that have been “getting by” compensating for other muscles by doing more than should reasonably be asked of them.  Such is the situation with my spinal erectors. 

I thought I had a back full of knots.  It turned out that my spinal erectors were just completely pumped from overuse while my abs were cruising along having done almost nothing.  Essentially, my spinal erectors were the reason I stayed upright all day long with a bag on my back.  There was no (or limited) support coming from the front.  No wonder I was getting backache by the end of day three.

I’m a great believer that all strength should be functional.  For example, there’s no point having a strong pair of glutes if, when you go to sit down you use a completely different movement pattern with your knees bending in to touch each other and still give yourself knee injuries, or you still use your quads to climb a few big steps to get over a stile in the middle of a walk.  So what use is it to me if I’ve got a strong set of abs if they only know how to work when I’m doing an ab-related exercise in the gym while I’m not actually using them to stay upright while walking around?

I’ve already decided to do the 100 rep challenge, cycling a different exercise every couple of weeks.  One of those exercises will now be the waiter’s walk (walking about with a dumbbell held above my head with a straight arm), teaching my abs that walking is one of those situations where they are supposed to do something.

Issue #2 – Poor scapular stability

I already knew that my upper traps were dominant and that I was bad at using my lats.  It seems though that I’ve got a more persistant problem across the use of my lower and mid traps, rhomboids and serratus anterior (thanks to Chris for all the technical names – that last one is a muscle that starts on the rib cage and goes under your arm to the scapula/shoulder blade).

This, and issue #3, were identified by Chris watching closely while I tried to keep my scapula locked down and do an overhead press movement.  It turns out that I can get almost all the way there and then, to extend the last bit I have to “unlock” my scapula, letting it move upwards.  No wonder then that on big overhead press movements I can get a big weight almost all the way up and then it suddenly starts waving about with no control in the last few inches of the lift.  The strange thing is that, once past this point, I can lock my scapula back down and bring my arm back down keeping my shoulder blades under control all the way, I just can’t push with them in that position.  It also surprised me that there was no pain involved.  It wasn’t like I was trying to stretch a knot or anything.  My arms just wouldn’t go any further.

To deal with this I need to be teaching my body to use these muscles.  And once it starts using them I need to build some strength in them too.

Issue #3 – Lack of thoracic mobility

This is another one linked to the previous issue and is also the likely cause of my rapidly worsening lumbar flexion and S-shaped curve to my spine.  I put the likely cause of this problem down to increased desk work recently and the main way to increase this mobility will be stretching my thoracic spine off the top of the stairs daily.  Chris wrote about this some time ago, using a foam roller, but we’ve since found that doing it off the top of the stairs stops you from compensating by allowing part of the extension to come from the small of your back (lumbar spine).

The workout change

Without solving these last two issues it is unsurprising that my overhead press and bench press are continually hitting a brick wall in their progress.  Until I can do a heavy pressing motion using the correct muscles and keeping my scapula under control, they aren’t going anywhere.  So all two arm presses are out of the program for now (for one arm presses I can keep my scapula locked down so I’m keeping this in to retain current strength levels).

So my new upper body workout (also reflecting the fact that I am currently playing with moving to an intensity-based programme from a volume-based programme) now looks like this:

• Bent over row (of some variant) – 5×5; superset with
• One-arm dumbbell overhead press – 5×5.
• Pull ups /chins (with added weight) – 3×5; superset with
• Press ups (with added weight/bands or elevated feet) – 3×5.

For my 100 rep challenges, in addition to the waiter’s walks I will be cycling through face pulls, behind the neck band pull aparts and chest supported rows, all of which will be educating my body, through tedious repetition and eventual boredom, how to use the correct muscles for such motions.

I’ve got an interesting few months ahead of me.  Do you think it’ll work?

Related posts:

1. Powerlifting progress 2010: week thirty-four
2. Powerlifting progress 2010: week thirty-five
3. Powerlifting progress 2010: week thirty-seven

Having finally decided to get Vibram FiveFingers for both Chris and me, and having spent a significant amount of time online finding out exactly how to do that in the UK, I’ve decided that it was worth sharing what I learned with everyone.

My new Vibram FiveFingers

Preparing for the price-tag

I understand that Vibram FiveFingers are reasonably easy to find in the US for the sensible price of about 80 US dollars (depending on exactly what design you get and where you get them).  Buying them in the UK you need to expect to spend 80-120 UK pounds (our KSO shoes were just under 100 UK pounds) – a massive mark up on the US price, even allowing for shipping – and you’ll quickly find that it’s difficult to locate somewhere to buy them. 

As far as I can tell, this “outside North America” mark-up seems to apply globally, so if you want a pair and happen to be on holiday in the US, use the opportunity to buy a pair of shoes too!

How to find Vibram FiveFingers

I found that in the UK none of the regular shoe shops or “outdoor shops” stock them.  In the UK most outdoor shops, with the exception of the few small independent stores, are starting to get a worrying trend towards stocking big-name brands of outdoor fashion garments and nothing else, but that is a completely separate rant. 

I strongly recommend trying them on first to guarantee the right size so it really is crucial to find somewhere nearby to go if possible.  The best way to track down a supplier is therefore via the stockists page on the Vibram FiveFingers site (Canada & the US; Global distributors). 

If you are in the UK there is currently one distributor, PrimalLifestyle.com, who then supply companies all over the UK.  You can find the list of stockists on their website.  After that a series of emails and phone calls found me someone nearby who, while selling them online, also caters for people who want to arrange an appointment to pop round to their house to try them before buying.  Thank you Fast and Fresh!

Avoid counterfeit Vibram FiveFingers

I was aware from reading the Vibram FiveFingers website (currently, see the pop up screen if you click on the big yellow “Beware Counterfeit” sign) and from then putting this together with a string of mixed negative and positive comments on Begin to Dig about the life-span and warranty or non-warranty of Vibram FiveFingers that I needed to take care to avoid counterfeit products.

For this reason I highly recommend following the process above, no matter where you are in the world, to be sure you are finding genuine products.

Fitting Vibram FiveFingers

Fitting is an interesting experience.

The Vibram FiveFingers website has a carefully constructed chart (found by clicking on the Vibram FiveFingers sizing link at the bottom of any of the product pages or by looking elsewhere).  You measure the length of your foot and then compare to the chart and the shoe type to find the right size in that make.

Plenty of people comment on the fact that you’ll most likely be a different size for Vibram FiveFingers than you are for a normal shoe.  In fact, I measured my foot and ended up in a pair of Vibram FiveFingers that was two sizes bigger thanks to having a particularly fat little toe (my feet seem to be evolving to have no toes).  Meanwhile Chris ended up with a pair two sizes smaller than the measurement suggested.  For this reason I can’t recommend strongly enough that you find a supplier nearby, even if it is just to try them and then purchase them online from someone else.

Other than that, it is also worth noting that each make fits a little bit differently.  However, rather than me doing a long section on this, it is easier to refer to you a long write-up by mc on Begin to Dig who tried on all the types available at the time.

So, are you tempted to try Vibram FiveFingers?  If so then I hope this information is useful to you.

Related posts:

1. Vibram FiveFingers (VFF): reviews
2. Vibram Five-fingers (VFF): ankle warmers
3. Vibram Five-fingers (VFF): outdoor review