We have both felt some difference, in particular with how rested we feel when we wake up each morning, even if we have to wake up early.  However, I’ve picked up in a few places that magnesium is also depleted much faster by stress, so last week was a bit of a test for Chris and me.  Not only were we dealing with increased stress created by our topsy-turvy living arrangements, but we were also unable to take our Epsom Salt baths (thanks to having no hot water).

The 25kg sack of magnesium in the form of Epsom salts which lives under the sink in our bathroom

This was our chance to find out, through removing it again, if the magnesium supplementation had been having any affect.

General observations from magnesium supplementation

Before last week’s break from magnesium, I had started noticing that the biggest change I was seeing as stress increased in my life was with my sleep.  I wasn’t able to get any more sleep than I was getting before and my dreams were as vivid and active as before.  The difference was with the way I felt each morning.

Previously a night of vivid dreams would leave me feeling tired and worn out the next morning with muscles sore as if I had been using them all night.  An article on Iron Man Magazine last week suggests there is some science behind this muscular exhaustion.  The article is about posing practice for a bodybuilding show increasing muscle size.  To quote the article:

“When your muscles are flexing, fibers are firing and working—and choking off the blood supply for 30 seconds to a minute as you hold a pose puts demands on the sarcoplasm, the energy fluid inside the muscle fibers.”

If you are tensing muscles in your sleep you are creating a similar demand on your muscle fibres.  This isn’t helpful when sleep cycles are meant to provide time for the muscles to rest and recuperate.

In comparison, for the last couple of months I have increasingly been waking up each morning feeling refreshed and rejuvenated.  Even when my night of sleep has been cut short due to an early start and I feel a little woolly-brained until I’ve been through the shower and properly woken up.

Observations from a week without magnesium supplements

It was a horrendous week last week.  Yes, I had a particularly bad week at work, getting home late most evenings, but even accounting for that, the characteristics and behaviours we saw could not be put down solely to the stress and normal behaviour we usually exhibit these days when we are stressed.

So here are the things we noticed:

• Feeling tired and physically drained after a night of sleep.
• Poor recovery from workouts with muscles still sore 2 days later.
• Gradual increase in length and frequency of bad tempers as the week progressed, with some impressive raging arguments by the end of the week about the most ridiculous things.
• Reduced ability to logically resolve issues or rationally analyse a situation.
• Poor performance at physical activity, worsening as the week progressed (most clearly seen through my commute bike ride home, slowing from 15.8mph to 15.0mph).
• Inability to control emotions with flare-ups or tears at the slightest thing – at work I would move from anger at one issue to anger at another, making me difficult and unpleasant to work with and resulting in some bad decisions during the week.
• Slower reactions to things (especially when cycling and driving).
• Slower ability to regain emotional control – such as ability to calm down again after someone cut me up when driving.

A lot of this is emotional rather than physical yet it all seems to link back to the quality of sleep.  They are all things that I have seen deteriorate in the past when I’ve had several consecutive nights of minimal sleep.

My best description of it was that it was almost like an out-of-body experience.  I could hear myself snapping at people and things, a little part of my brain could sense I was reacting poorly and could even understand what the rational interpretation would be, yet I couldn’t stop my emotions from coming straight out of my vocal chords or body language.  There was a disconnect where my brain should have been.

Frankly, I found the entire experience illuminating and also a little terrifying.  Behaviours that I had believed had been brought under control through coaching at work a few years ago were reappearing worse than ever before.  I’d been pleased to be seeing continued improvement, even over the last few months when I knew the stresses were getting worse.  Now I believe that I would have seen a reduction in my ability to control those emotions and reactions in the last few months if it wasn’t for the fact that I started dosing with magnesium at about the same time.

Instant improvement

On Friday night I came home to a warm house and took a half hour Epsom bath after ranting to Chris about several drivers who had tried to kill me as a cycled home.

I didn’t feel any better at first and Chris and I continued arguing as we did the shopping that evening, although I was now able to control myself sometimes when it was clear that the jibe Chris had made wasn’t really meant.  At this point Chris still hadn’t supplemented.

The next morning my alarm woke me up and I felt instantly alert and refreshed.  I got in a good workout in the gym, my clarity of thought was back where it should be and I felt completely in control of myself.

Learning points

So what did I learn from this experience?

Mostly I learned that the magnesium, supplemented through the use of regular Epsom salt baths, really is making a difference to me.  Epsom salt baths are now compulsory, not just an experimental optional extra.

It also made me think that Epsom salt baths should be compulsory for anyone in the western world.  Anyone who isn’t already horizontal and stress free at any rate!

Does this experience tempt you to try some magnesium supplementation too?  If so, I would be really interested to hear what things seem to improve for you.

Related posts:

1. Magnesium
2. Powerlifting progress 2011: week thirty-five

How to keep a life timetable

While keeping a detailed timetable of your life can prove tedious at times, it’s a worthwhile exercise to do for a couple of weeks just to see where the time opportunities are, where you’re taking longer than you should over something (and are therefore taking some bits of guilty “me-time”) and where you’re overdoing things and really ought to make more space.

The easiest way to do it is to build a basic excel spreadsheet on the computer that is nearest to you for the majority of the time.  For me this was my work computer.  To keep it accessible at the weekends, since my work USB stick wasn’t compatible with my home computer, I uploaded it as an attachment on a draft email in my online email account.  During a standard day I would keep it open all the time, adding to it whenever I changed what I was doing or when I ate something.

Choose your level of detail

You don’t have to get that detailed if you don’t want to.  Say you just want a flavour of how long you are spending between sleeping, commuting, working, doing workouts and actively relaxing (eg. watching TV) then just record those things and use “other” for anything else.

For my own experiment I wanted to get really granular.  Not only did I want to know if there was time I could reclaim to do other things, I also wanted to get a grip on how much relaxation I was getting and how much time was spent at work and commuting – time that I’ll reclaim next year.  I wanted to know why I couldn’t fit anything else into my life.  A quick tally in my head suggested there were more hours available during my weekdays than I actually had.  Where were they going?

To make sense of the data in this level of detail I added an extra column, categorising my detailed comments into broader categories that could be analysed.

Getting extra benefits

Since I was recording every moment of my day I also recorded in the comments what I was eating, recording the details of every naughty little nibble.  I was aware that with the other stresses in life I was being a bit more laid back about my food choices, despite still caring about what I was doing to my body but I wondered how often I was slipping up.

By highlighting cells in red if it included something I felt didn’t fit with my healthy diet concepts I was able to shock myself into realising I was slipping something through the net almost daily.  It was amazing how quickly this changed when the results were staring me in the face though.

The results

Here’s what an average weekday without a workout ended up looking like:

• 07.00 – Rolling (self-massage with the baseball)
• 07.15 – Shower (shower, weigh in, get dressed)
• 07.35 – Violin practice
• 08.10 – Pack for work including putting my bike in the car
• 08.15 – Drive to work (actually, Chris giving me a lift)
• 08.45 – Work
• 12.45 – Relax (if things aren’t too hectic at work I’ll take 30-45 minutes to sit in the canteen with work colleagues and drink a mug of tea while they eat lunch)
• 13.15 – Work
• 17.45 – Cycling (this includes about 15 minutes of packing up at work and changing into my cycle gear and then 5 minutes unpacking and racking my bike when I get home)
• 18.50 – Shower for 20 minutes, including changing and just recovering from the day OR Epsom Salt bath, which takes over half an hour by the time I’ve run the bath and got dressed at the end of it
• 19.10 or 19.30 – Something: this could be time spent doing some cleaning, dealing with house paperwork, doing blog research or something similar.  Sometimes I’ll cook the dinner instead of Chris in this window as well.
• 20.45 – Dinner (Chris and I make the effort to sit down together at this point and talk over dinner – it’s usually the first opportunity we’ve had since we went to work).  Yes, this is the only time I eat on a non-workout day unless I’ve given in to someone’s birthday cakes at work, which I always make sure is at least right at the end of the day just before I cycle home if I’m feeling weak-willed and know I’m going to give in to the cake/chocolate desire)
• 21.10 – Housework (washing up and cleaning the kitchen)
• 21.40 – Relax in bed.  I would put “sleep” here, but the reality is that Chris and I talk for at least 20 minutes after we get into bed and put the light out.
• 22.00 – Sleep

On the one day when I do a workout this changes to me driving myself to work and then from 17.45 it goes like this:

• 17.45 – Drive home
• 18.15 – Change and eat a tin of tuna mixed with mayonnaise and a spoon of sauerkraut
• 18.30 – Gym
• 20.30 – Shower
• 20.45 – Dinner and back to the routine above.

One day a week I’ll work in Birmingham – it looks like this:

• 06.30 – Rolling
• 06.45 – Shower
• 07.00 – Pack for work
• 07.10 – Drive to work (should take about 75 minutes but traffic at commuter times is dreadful)
• 08.45 – Work
• 17.00 – Drive home (leaving work early having worked through lunchtime but still hitting bad traffic)
• 18.15 – Shopping (there’s a supermarket near my motorway exit so I try to put my Birmingham day near the end of the week and shop on the way home, otherwise I’ll have to shop in my “something” window on another day).
• 19.15 – Finish driving home
• 19.45 – Unpack shopping
• 20.10 – Housework (washing up and things usually) and perhaps clearing emails and Google Reader
• 20.45 – Dinner with Chris and back to the usual post-dinner routine.

So there’s 30 – 90 minutes on my non-workout days to do the things I want to do, including keeping the house in a presentable state, keeping on top of the paperwork and my emails, reading for the blog and so on.  That’s why the blog writing moved to be a solely weekend activity a few months ago.

Oh, and this doesn’t count the fact that with a concert coming up I now spend all of Wednesday evening at a rehearsal too.

The results – making it meaningful

So this timetable is useful, but what does it really mean.  What was the majority of my week spent doing after I include the weekends as well?

The easiest way to look at it is in a pie chart of the whole week.  Here’s an average sort of week with totals in days, hours and minutes:

Chart of my week - 20-26 August 2011

A few notes on that particular week:

• I was doing our tax returns, so there’s more paperwork than normal and no “technical reading”.
• We went for a walk at the weekend, hence “walking”.
• The babysitting and Chris business bits are me doing various admin bits like flyers and profile updates online.
• “Training” is my gym sessions.
• I tend to anything that could be relaxing into “relaxing”.

I was pleased by the dedication to getting sufficient sleep each night and pleased with the consistency of my rolling.  I was disappointed by how little time I find to move about training, walking and cycling.  Despite that my housework is usually quite active and once I remove that work slice I can replace it with more activity and a bit more technical reading and blog work.

So I gained a lot of benefit from my life timetable.  It revealed when my windows of opportunity were, how much rubbish I was eating, what needed moving to the weekend (the blog) and what I wasn’t getting enough of (activity).

Hopefully my pointers are helpful for anyone thinking of keeping a diary like this.  Would you have the dedication to keep a life-timetable?  Have you already done so?  If you have, then what did it reveal for you?  I’d love to find out how other busy people fit everything into their lives.  This was done during quiet season at work so I’d love to know how people who are even busier or who have children to work around fit training into their lives.

Related posts:

1. Work-Life balance
2. Self massage for a busy life

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

Initially I wasn’t going to do this for another week but I had a wonderful, if crazy, weekend squeezing in a trip to London, visiting some old friends and going to my younger niece’s first birthday party.  Unfortunately it meant I didn’t have time to finish pulling together the type 2 diabetes material so this is me buying myself another week.  Sorry everyone!

Stressful life

No stresses out here but it's different when I'm home

I’m not sure if I’ve ever put on this blog what I do for a day job, other than noting that it is a desk job.  I am a corporate tax advisor.  There’s a reasonable amount of responsibility involved and the interaction with clients makes my day unreliable.  I can start the day with an urgent to-do list, find that my phone rings off the hook with queries from clients that they want dealing with urgently, assist more junior staff through the day with their queries and, at the end of the day, find myself with the same to-do list still outstanding and have to work late to make a dent on it.

When things are quiet my working day will be reasonably reliable.  I should work 09.00 – 17.30 with an hour for lunch.  However, the reality is that an average day has me arriving at 08.30 and packing up at 18.00, while only getting up from my desk for lunch depending on my client work that day.  Compared to bankers and lawyers, my job is really much less stressful than it could be.  Having said that, I often have a few months at a time when there are several big projects on as well as the usual day-to-day pieces, when the hours are unreliable, when there is too much going on, when a client is being unreasonable in their demands, and when something comes up at 5pm on a Friday and I end up doing several hours at the weekend.

On top of this I have a natural tendency towards “allowing” situations to become stressful.  I’ve done a lot of work over the last few years with the help of a mentor at work.  This has helped me get some control over my OCD-type approach to living (no more obsessive washing up when I get home from work late) and also given me the perspective to step back from things and keep chilled more often.

It’s not perfect – I still get wired and stressed when things get really bad at work but I’m a lot better than I used to be.

What I want from life

When I was 8 years old I announced to my parents that I was going to build up a property portfolio and then use the rental as income so that I was free to travel all over the place.  At the time I remember that in my mind this was limited to the excitement, as I perceived it, of travelling to new places in the UK by train.  Pretty perceptive for an 8 year old.

By my early teens this has changed slightly to an idea that I would also be a reader for publishing houses (doing the first read of manuscripts that a publishing house receives to decide if they should make it to the editor’s desk) or a proof-reader.  These were jobs working with reading, which I loved, and which could be done freelance at times that suited me.

I’ve never let go of the idea that I wanted to be able to relax and explore and do all the activities I enjoyed.  The flawed UK school system meant I had to make a notable decision about which way my life was going to go when I was 14 years old.  I decided at that point that while I loved music and playing my violin, piano and singing, I didn’t want to make a living doing music.  I worried that I might end up hating music because I would have to accept every piece of work that came my way, no matter whether it was a job I wanted to do or not.

My violin and I - music will always be part of my life

In my final meeting with my lecturer when I was graduating from University I told my lecturer that I would love to keep doing research but didn’t want to rely on it for a living.  I told her I was going to be an accountant and save up until I could afford to retire early and be free to do the research without having to do worry about whether it would earn enough money.  I had in mind 35-40 years old.

I’ve put this all down here because it gives a lot of insight to what I want from life and how the idea of that lifestyle developed as my understanding of how the real world has changed.  If I were to summarise what I want from life it would be as follows:

• Financial security through careful investment of money I’ve made myself (I’ve never wanted to rely on someone else for money)
• Having the freedom to explore places and activities when I want
• Pursuing all the things I enjoy in life including music (especially my violin, piano and singing) and academic research (these days torn between archaeology, nutrition and fitness)
• Ability to consistently improve my gym performance eventually qualifying to compete at National or even World levels at drug-free powerlifting
• Being outdoors doing things like rock climbing, cycling, walking, wild-camping with the flexibility to go when the weather is good rather than when my time allows it.

What I don’t get from life at present

Right now I aim to fit in the following things to my life:

• Full-time job as corporate tax adviser
• Playing violin
• Passing on my skills and knowledge by teaching violin, piano and general musicianship at weekends
• Powerlifting training
• Cycling
• Regular walking trips, working for a walking company and checking their self-guided routes
• Technical research in the form of reading and writing for this blog

I’m not doing badly at meeting my list of things I want from life but there are some problems with fitting it all in.  Recently, I decided that I wanted to do more cycling, because I realised that I had not touched the bike for 9 months.  To fit some cycling in, I had to cut down from three to two workouts a week and I built the cycling into my commute to cut out 20 mins of normal commute time and put it into my cycling time.  Chris now kindly drops me off at work with my bike and I cycle home on days when I don’t have a workout planned and won’t need the car to drive to a client or another office.

I also wanted to spend more time practicing my violin, getting my piano playing back in line with where it was and increasing my teaching volume – I was really missing music.  To manage that I had to cut down my blog work, which I was already focussing on weekends to free up teaching time, and tighten up the timetable of my weekday evenings to ensure a half hour of practice time can be grabbed most days.

My desk job was starting to impact badly on my posture so I needed to build 15-30 mins of rolling time into every day – I started getting up earlier.

Then there are the things I just don’t manage to fit in at all.  Rock climbing, wild-camping outside of walking holidays, doing the walking when the weather is good (holiday gets booked up to a year in advance – I’ve no idea what the weather forecast will be), archaeology research, reading fiction books (although I’ve started doing this while I do my rolling), singing, getting piano practice in is very hit and miss, long-distance bike rides (some of you may remember that a year or two ago I was doing 80-100 mile rides most weekends, touring style which took 5-6 hours)…

I'd like more of this in my life

There just isn’t the time to do everything I want to do.

A radical solution

You probably already understand from all of this why the blog has been taking a bit of a back-burner for the last few months and why my training has gone down to a maintenance level.  However, there was a reason why I was prepared to make those sacrifices – I knew that I had a long-term plan and this was a short-term problem.  I have, essentially been leading two or three lives simultaneously for the last few months. 

Chris and I have been working hard for the last few years, living a frugal lifestyle and putting everything aside to pay off our mortgage.  We knew that if we could clear the mortgage then our main drain on cash would be gone.  Thanks to our frugal living, which has become a habit rather than a chore, our need for money is very reasonable.  So back in April we finally managed to pay off the mortgage and have been building up an emergency reserve since then. 

During the last few months I’ve been increasing the number of music pupils I have at weekends to build it to the point where it can bring in sufficient recurring income to cover my contribution to the house expenses.  A few weeks ago I told work that I will be leaving the firm at Christmas.

That’s right!

At the start of January I will be without a desk job.  Instead I will be teaching music at the weekends to bring in the money I need and taking paid playing work on my violin when it comes up.  That will leave me free from Monday to Friday when I can head out cycling, walking, camping, climbing and anything else I like whenever the weather is good.  I’ll also have the time to do research whenever I want.

I’m hoping that the lack of desk job will also mean I can fix the mobility problems in my upper back.  This would mean that I can finally get a grip on my bench press.  That’s why I announced at the start of this year that 2011 was the year of the deadlift and 2012 would be the year of the bench press.  Once I’ve sorted out my bench press problems I will feel confident about competing and start on that path.

The best bit should be that this removes one of the least controllable stressors in my life.  The result should be top-notch health and happiness.

Imagine being this relaxed all the time...

Being brave

I’m terrified that it might all go wrong and I’ll find myself jobless and penniless, but I need to take control of my life so that I live the life I want to live.  Seth Godin put is beautifully when he said:

Make big promises.

Burn your boats.

Set yourself up in a place where you have few options and the stakes are high.

Focused energy and serious intent will push you to do your best work.  You have nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.  (Better than the alternative.)

Apologies if I’m not always consistent in my writing for the rest of the year – as the teaching work builds up I will have less time for myself.  I promise things will be back on track and better than ever next year.

Do you think I’m crazy?

No related posts.

Keep an open mind

Robb Wolf has said on one of his podcasts (number 89) that diabetics are one of the few groups of people who are not even prepared to consider that it might be possible to improve their condition with dietary changes.  He notes that sufferers will vehemently fight against anyone who suggests that the Paleo diet (or anything else) may provide a solution and will rarely consider trying the Paleo diet for Robb’s trademark 30-day trial period. 

I wasn’t sure how much I believed this until I stumbled on a discussion on a diabetes forum about one of the testimonials on Robb’s site.  Not only was there a huge amount of misunderstanding about what a Paleo diet is (Note: it is not a low-carb diet, unless you choose to make it so.) but a lot of the responses seem to be knee-jerk reactions, some even suggesting the testimonial is made up with “faked” photos, without really considering the diet properly.  As a result I fully expect to be “flamed” for this article despite the fact that I’m going to reference the studies I’ve read.

Please try to keep an open mind as you read this and note that I will moderate any unconstructive comments.  However all views are welcomed from both sides of the fence – I’m just gathering together ideas and research here, I don’t have a hidden agenda.

Keep an open mind - there may be a way to reduce the frequency of (or even stop) insulin injections (image courtesy of Jill A. Brown)

Type 1 diabetes as an autoimmune disease

It is widely accepted that type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease in which the body starts attacking itself.  Specifically, the body starts destroying the beta cells in the pancreas.  The beta cells produce the insulin which the body needs to store glucose – for a reminder on why this needs to happen revisit my introduction article – so if the beta cells have been killed off there won’t be any insulin released when blood glucose levels rise.

Improving type 1 diabetes with supplements

The way to stop this beta cell apoptosis (the proper term for cell death) would be to find a way to stop the body attacking itself and a good place to start is looking at supplements known to help with other autoimmune diseases.  I mentioned last week that the John Hopkins site claimed that more than 90% of beta cells will have been destroyed before the clinical symptoms of diabetes develop (1) so if supplements can slow or halt the apoptosis then there may also be a way to halt onset of type 1 diabetes before the production of insulin gets to clinically low levels.

Vitamin D

Vitamin D has a reputation for aiding in the treatment of autoimmune diseases and I’ve found studies which are free to access on the internet dating back to 2001 that look at the link between type 1 diabetes and vitamin D. 

A thorough study which sets the groundwork for a connection between vitamin D intake and type 1 diabetes was carried out in Northern Finland where sunlight levels are limited, therefore providing some control over non-supplemental vitamin D intake and creation.  The study aimed to follow all births in two regions during 1966, recording the vitamin D supplementation levels during the first year of infancy and, afterwards, the onset of type 1 diabetes in those same individuals in the period to December 1997.  The results show a clear correlation between those with rickets (caused by vitamin D deficiency) or irregular, low or no vitamin D supplementation in infancy and the onset of type 1 diabetes in later life (2).

These results are further supported by later studies (3) so it appears that vitamin D at a significant level can help reduce the risk of type 1 diabetes for your child, especially if you start this supplementation early (3).  However, it’s interesting to note that despite having ploughed through numerous other studies on vitamin D and type 1 diabetes (not referenced here) I’ve not found any studies suggesting that vitamin D supplementation in later life can help prevent the onset of type 1 diabetes or resolve it once it is diagnosed.  All those who are pregnant or have young children take note – this seems to be a one-off opportunity to boost the immune system and set it up for life!

Vitamin D - preventing type 1 diabetes from infancy

Vitamin E

Once someone has type 1 diabetes there are all sorts of other problems that may occur as a result of the diabetes, including retinal problems (I mentioned in my introduction that sudden changes to eyesight can be a tell-tale marker of diabetes).  There is also a risk of renal complications – while the renal clearance of glucose is usually 0 mL/min (4), diabetics characteristically have sugary urine.  The renal system is doing something it isn’t really designed to do all the time which, over time, can damage it.

The good news is that I’ve found a study suggesting that this damage can potentially be mended through oral supplementation of 1,800iu vitamin E (5).  The vitamin E was found to normalise blood flow to the retina and also improve renal function.

The gut as part of our immune system

I have mentioned elsewhere on my blog about the role of the gut in our immune system.  The gut is the frontline of our immune system as the digestive system presents almost the only access points to the human body and therefore the main way for bad viruses and germs to enter the body and bloodstream.  To combat this, our digestive system starts out on life with a barrage of defences ranging from enzymes and good bacteria to combat the bad bacteria through to carefully constructed defence walls which should only be permeable to molecules after they have undergone processing and the body can be sure that they are appropriate and small enough to not cause issues.

Many people will have heard of leaky gut.  This is caused when the gut lining is permeated so that larger molecules, such as amino acids which are not yet sufficiently broken down, can get into the bloodstream causing irritation.  The body will attack these cells in the blood in an effort to destroy them.  (This can often lead to subsequent “allergies” to those particular protein-foods because the body is being irritated by the large particles getting into the bloodstream.) 

A common cause of the breakdown in the defences can be yeasts and fungi which can grow on the gut lining, drilling their “fingers” through the wall until they perforate it.  Leaky gut, while theoretically easy enough to cause is also relatively easy to heal by removal of the problem foods and reintroduction of healthy bacteria, allowing the gut to heal.

The Paleo Diet: fixing the gut and type 1 diabetes

This is just one example of how foods which adversely impact the digestive system can subsequently lead to autoimmune diseases.  It is as a result of this that the Paleo diet, which strips out foods leading to destruction of the digestive system such as gluten and sugar, has had such success in curing auto-immune diseases.  By taking away the problem foods the body has time to heal the internal damage and appears to stop attacking itself.

The crucial point to note is that this is not unsupported when it comes to diabetes.  Studies have found a link between wheat consumption, gut irritation and type 1 diabetes; although it seems that only approximately 50% of those studied show this link suggesting other causes of the auto-immune behaviour of the body in other type 1 diabetics (6).  However, it is encouraging to consider that approximately half of type 1 diabetics could potentially halt the existing destruction of their beta cells (and those who do not yet show clinical symptoms could perhaps prevent the development of type 1 diabetes entirely) by following a diet like the Paleo diet. 

In particular, it is worth noting that these studies are only looking at the role of wheat but there are other foods also removed by the Paleo diet which are known to contribute to auto-immune conditions and which might account for a few more diabetics – something to be studied further perhaps?  I’m not saying that a strict Paleo diet is the solution.  In essence any diet cutting out those sorts of foods (wheat, gluten, sugar etc), whether you put a name to it or not, should have the same effect.  However there is plenty of material and support for those starting out on a Paleo diet which is why it might be a helpful place to start.

There are other known causes of immune system problems, such as chronic stress, but I’m not clear how much these then lead to autoimmune conditions rather than just impacting the current effectiveness of the immune system.

Curing type 1 diabetes – regenerating the beta cells

Where does this leave us?  In this article I’ve identified some ways to prevent diabetes from ever getting started, by boosting the immune system in infancy.  I’ve also identified a potential way to prevent the ongoing attack and apoptosis of the beta cells for a number of type 1 diabetics.  However, even preventing the ongoing destruction of the insulin-producing beta cells will not cure a type 1 diabetic if they are already at clinical levels where the body is unable to produce sufficient insulin.  So how can there be testimonials of people claiming to have cured their type 1 diabetes?

Something was bothering me as I did the research for this article.  In various other pieces of research or technical reading I have frequently come across the concept that the body is capable of regenerating things.  It can’t regrow limbs, but there is evidence of incredible levels of regeneration activity, like the body growing new arteries to bypass blockages (7, pp.7-10).  If it can do that then why can it not regenerate the beta cells?

The obvious answer seems to me to be that the body is attacking the beta cells so there is no sense in creating more.  Instead the beta cells should just continue to dwindle away until there are none left.  However a fascinating study by Meier et al suggests that beta cells can and do regenerate (8). 

Their conclusion arose through studying pancreatic tissue obtained at autopsy from 42 individuals who had type 1 diabetes.  The ongoing destruction of beta cells appeared to be continuing yet the number of beta cells remaining had no correlation to how long a person had had diabetes.  If beta cells couldn’t regenerate then you would expect fewer cells in those who had had diabetes for longer.  The implication is that the cells can regenerate.  I can’t do justice to the study here but I strongly recommend that anyone with an interest in type 1 diabetes takes the time to read it – I’ve included a link in the bibliography.

Testimonials

What I’ve taken away from all of this reading is that there may be a cure out there for type 1 diabetics.  Step 1 would be to resolve the autoimmune issue, perhaps through removal of problematic foods and allowing the body’s most essential part of the immune system, the gut, to heal.  Step 2 would then be to maintain this state of autoimmune improvement while the beta cells regenerate. 

It is important to remember that the clinical conditions only appear when there are fewer than 10% of the beta cells functioning so even if insulin replacement therapy ceases to be needed it doesn’t mean you are fully “cured”.  While step 1 may need to be followed for life, it is possible that, in time, the odd diversion from the perfect diet may be taken, such as a celebratory birthday cake, without any issues.  The body would produce the insulin needed from the new beta cells and, while the treat might flare up a slight autoimmunity again, the body should quickly recover the situation if the person then goes back to their “autoimmune healing protocol”, whatever that may be.

If you still don’t believe that changing diet can improve type 1 diabetes, then I’ve collected together a few testimonials.  See what you think.

• The Paleo Diet – JoAnne
• Robb Wolf – Kyp (this is the one which the diabetes forum was discussing)
• Robb Wolf – Anonymous
• Robb Wolf – Yahaira Gil-Maestro (who you can also find on her own blog, My Diabetic Paleo Experience: Does it work?)

*****

I hope this has provided people with some food for thought.  I was surprised by a lot of the material I read as I went through this and consequently I think it would be well worth keeping an open mind. 

For those with type 1 diabetes it may well be worth playing with some dietary changes, trying to resolve the auto-immune issues.  Try a 30 or even a 60-day Paleo challenge or something similar, stripping out known irritant foods.  The worst that can happen is that nothing changes and the best is that you might just start to get better.

Bibliography

1. Cihakova D: Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus.  John Hopkins Medical Institutions website.
2. Hyppönen E, Läärä E, Reunanen A, Järvelin M, Virtanen S: Intake of vitamin D and risk of type 1 diabetes: a birth-cohort study.  The Lancet 2001; 358:1500-03.
3. Zipitis CS, Akobeng AK: Vitamin D supplementation in early childhood and risk of type 1 diabetes: a systematic review and meta-analysis.  Arch Dis Child 2008; 93:512-517.
4. Vander A, Sherman J, Luciano D: Human Physiology: the mechanisms of body function.  McGraw-Hill 1998; Ed.7
5. Bursell S, Clermont AC, Aiello, LP, Aiello LM, Schlossman DK, Feener EP, Laffel L, King GL: High-dose vitamin E supplementation normalizes retinal blood flow and creatinine clearance in patients with type 1 diabetes.  Diabetes Care 1999; 22:1245-1251.
6. Knip M: Diet, gut and type 1 diabetes: role of wheat-derived peptides.  Diabetes 2009; 58:1723-1724.
7. Kendrick M: The great cholesterol con.  John Blake Publishing 2007.
8. Meier JJ, Bhushan A, Butler AE, Rizza RA, Butler PC: Sustained beta cell apoptosis in patients with long-standing type 1 diabetes: indirect evidence for islet regeneration?  Diabetologia 2005; 48:2221-2228.

Related posts:

1. Type 1 diabetes
2. Type 2 diabetes
3. Diabetes: an introduction

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

In the few years after that I expanded my repertoire to cabbages, swiss chard, sweetcorn (which never grew properly), potatoes, brussel sprouts and learning to be patient.  By year three I had just about learned to leave the carrots in the ground until they reached a sensible size, rather than excitedly pulling them up when they reached finger-length at which point (to the child’s eye) they were clearly ready to eat!

When I was eleven we moved and I never really got back to vegetable gardening, other than a brief flirtation with it when I lived in London in my first house.  However, I have often hankered to return to growing my own vegetables and I’m currently trying to get an allotment plot.  Apart from everything else there is something therapeutic and relaxing about vegetable gardening.  I’m also well aware that in these cash-strapped times many other people are turning to growing their own vegetables for the first time and I’ve noticed a particular surge in posts about growing herbs and vegetables on the various Paleo blogs which I follow where the current trend is knowing where your food has come from.

The vegetable garden at Ham House (creative commons image from Geograph)

I’ve decided to pull together a few of the posts I’ve seen, plus a few other useful articles which have “cropped up” (excuse the pun) on other self-sufficiency and grower’s sites which I frequent.  There’s not too much explanation of each article, since they are mostly self-explanatory in title.

• Before getting into the nitty-gritty I thought it might be inspiring to read an article about the joys of vegetable gardening from someone recalling their first steps in home-grown vegetables.
• An excellent summary starting point in How to Grow Your First Garden from Jane Sanders.
• There’s also some summary advice on setting up a new vegetable garden from the BBC, thanks to the Gardener’s World team.  The index on the right gives additional links to this “productive garden” section of the site.
• If you want to start with a simple herb garden then you can always learn from other people’s first attempts.  One of Mark Sisson’s Worker Bees had a go at planting up a container-based herb garden and, if you are new to it, the article and the comments afterwards should give you some good tips.
• As well as containers, you may be thinking about having raised beds.  It’s certainly something I considered putting into our garden at home where the soil is particularly poor quality and nothing will grow.  The Vegetable Patch site has done a complete guide on things to consider when building raised beds.
• If you are starting your own produce garden to save some money then you might want to consider these money-saving tips for vegetable gardening.
• Robb Wolf’s blog is running a new series called The Liberty Garden.  It has so far got articles covering subjects as diverse as how to set about composting and how to grow sweet potatoes.  Definitely a page worth keeping an eye on.
• The Cottage Smallholder is a lovely self-sufficiency blog which I follow.  I find it particularly useful for me since the author is based in the UK, so the timing of articles is relevant to me.  There is a whole section of posts about vegetable and herb growing, although there are some specific posts I’d like to draw attention to: Egyptian Walking Onions (a brilliant onion to consider growing), how to prepare your own tomato seeds (rather than buying them) and a bit more advice on growing tomatoes.

That is just a taste of a few sites to get you started.  It is always worth deciding what sorts of vegetables and herbs you would like to grow and search specifically online for “how to grow [insert preferred plant here]” since that will get you some advice relevant to that particular plant.  However, in getting to that stage there is plenty to do in deciding on your site, what sort of garden you’ll have (beds, raised beds or containers) and preparing the soil.  Hopefully there is advice above to help everyone who is in those really early days of vegetable gardening.

Happy planting and best of luck!  If you know of other useful sites for the beginner produce gardener, please feel free to share them in the comments.

Related posts:

1. Paleo recipes: summer roasted vegetables
2. Blog-watch: the impact of stress
3. Blog-watch: saturated fat

Using your kitchen cupboards to best effect

Our kitchen cupboards frequently undergo an overhaul.  The reason for this has been that we find that the cupboards can control our dietary habits.  There are a few basic rules that we apply:

1. If you have a diet that restricts certain foods to specific days (eg. carb cycling) separate your staple cupboard foods into the different foods.  In our pre-Paleo days we spent some time carb cycling so that we only had carbs (excluding low net carb vegetables) on a Saturday.  To avoid us having to torture ourselves with the sight of “comfort carbs” all week we put the “high carb” foods (potatoes, pasta, rice, sugar, honey, oats, flapjacks etc) in a “Carb Cupboard” which was only opened on Saturdays. 
2. If you have a diet which eliminates certain foods but you still feel the need to keep them in the house for guests (eg. we keep some sugar and UHT milk sachets for others to use with tea and coffee), keep them on a difficult-to-access or rarely used shelf.

Really, it all boils down to the motto “out of sight, out of mind”.

New diet?  Clear the decks!

Whenever embarking on a new diet, one of the best things you can do to help yourself is to sort the cupboards.  If there are foods you shouldn’t eat, bin them.  If there are foods you can only eat at limited times find an out of the way place for them.  What you are trying to achieve is to remove the temptation. 

None of this will be news to people.  There is plenty of noise made about clearing the cupboards when starting on a diet.  However, there is a lot less noise made about repeating that exercise on a semi-regular basis.

Our cupboard review

After reading Robb’s book we decided it was time for a re-clear of the kitchen cupboards.  We knew that things were accumulating which we don’t eat.  What we hadn’t realised was how much (and how easily) those foods can accumulate in your cupboards, even when you are actively following the diet.

Non-paleo foods sneaking back into our cupboards

Here’s what I found (and binned or donated to friends) the other week:

• Bag of caster sugar – bought to make a couple of banoffee pies for work
• Pack of spaghetti –this was being stored elsewhere and probably missed the original cull
• Half a bag of rice – leftover from when we had some cycle tourists to stay
• Jar of strawberry jam – received as part of a Christmas gift hamper
• Bottle of luxury milk chocolate dessert sauce – part of the same hamper
• Packet of shortbread biscuits – again from the gift hamper
• Jar of relish – another hamper gift, full of sugar
• Tin of condensed milk – leftovers from the banoffee pie cooking
• Pot of instant gravy granules – from our early roast dinner days, but the ingredients are full of unmentionable rubbish
• Box of gravy powder – I was quite sorry to see this go, but having been quite shocked by the statistic that even a little gluten can cause repercussions in the body for up to two weeks I felt I needed to bin it in order to force myself to make gravy by different methods rather than taking the shortcut
• Packets of stock cubes – I have actually kept these for now.  I don’t use them very often and while they do have a little wheat flour in them and I will be trying to make alternatives in the long-term, I’m going to use them until that long-term solution is established (we rarely get meat which is on the bone and I don’t have freezer space any more to store homemade stock so this is going to take quite a bit of thinking)
• Soy sauce – I hadn’t realised it, but the brand of soy sauce we used was full of wheat flour and cornflour
• Jar of oats – leftover from pre-Paleo days and kept for friends who wanted porridge for breakfast
• Treacle – search me…
• TVP (soy protein) – in case vegetarian friends visited (but they never have).

Did that list surprise you?  It certainly surprised us.  It’s a long list for a household where we don’t ever eat these things.

We’ve been fascinated to see how much unnecessary food has accumulated over a couple of years so my challenge to everyone reading this blog who follows any type of diet (not just the Paleo diet) is to have a similar cupboard “re-clear” and see what oddities are now lurking at the back.  Are you on a no-cake-and-chocolate diet?  See if you can find those biscuits you bought for when a friend visited you a few months ago…

Let me know what you find!

Related posts:

1. Kitchen skills: finding time
2. Lessons learned this week: kitchen experiment accidents
3. Paleo kitchen experiments: tuna coleslaw and other portable meals

We were walking through the Lake District, following Wainwright’s Coast to Coast route from St Bee’s on the east coast as far as Kirkby Stephen on the west side of the Yorkshire Dales.  We did the rest of the route (Kirkby Stephen to Robin Hood’s Bay on the east coast) last September.  We walked for five days during which we made our way through about 88 miles.

For some reason the walking was tougher than usual.  I suspect it was because all the things going on in my life have combined with poor weather so that I’ve done almost nothing resembling cardio for several months.  Exhaustion combined with rough terrain underfoot and narrow paths meant that long stretches of time were spent concentrating on our feet and walking in single file without the usual discussions that usually accompany our walking weeks.  Instead it was a week for contemplation.

Here are some of the week’s observations and thought.

Diet

As usually happens on these weeks, we eat what food we can get our hands on which are affordable and sufficiently filling.  It means a week of rubbish, including:

• bulking up on large amount of potatoes
• servings of gluten foods (battered fish or steak pie is usually reliable for filling pub dinners while breakfasts when sleeping “in” frequently include lots of toast and cereal to get enough food),
• sometimes sugar (not just breakfast cereals but also hot puddings with custard at dinner when the meal hasn’t been filling enough). 

Dehydration on hot days also means I’ll throw back a pint of diet coke when we first reach a pub, since it is impossible to fit in sufficient water to rehydrate at the same time as trying to consume all the food needed to fill us up.

I now have 14 weeks until the next walking holiday.  Unfortunately that holiday will be in the Alps where avoiding gluten will be impossible.  We’ll be in the mountains at Alpine Huts where you take what is on offer or starve.

I wasn’t very strict with my diet in the last few weeks before holidays and subsequently felt horrible and gained some body fat but I am determined to be clean and stick to the meal plans for these 14 weeks.  Hopefully it’ll make me feel a bit better again and also improve my figure too.

Soft tissue work

We took our portable rolling kit with us (one baseball and a short stretch of plastic waste pipe for rolling legs).  We found that, compared to usual, our recovery overnight was much better than usual.  We weren’t as stiff as we might otherwise be each morning and were able to set off after breakfast without hobbling.

This has cemented the knowledge that, when you are putting your body through the wringer, ongoing soft tissue work is worth every minute you can spare for it.

Getting in the cardio

I’m going to start coming home via the work membership gym on non workout days and spending a brief bit of time on an elliptical machine during this 14 weeks stint.  I don’t want this same level of discomfort in the Alps.

Maintaining glute strength while walking

We’d had this great plan to do single leg elevated foot glute bridges each evening to ensure that our glute strength didn’t disappear like it usually does during walking holidays.  We failed.  We were just too trashed at the end of each day to start doing tiring exercises.

I’ll have to find another way to address this issue next time and I’m waiting to see what my squat workout on Wednesday tells me about my remaining glute strength.

The benefits of strong glutes for steep hills

Years ago I used to suffer from knee pain on the hills.  On one memorable mountaineering trip I had to bail after the first few days because the pain was so bad I could no longer safely attempt any ascents.

Fast-forward a few years and a lot of glute-strengthening exercises and I’ve now got minimal knee pain.  This week’s walks had some particularly tough (nd consecutive) climbs and descents and I would be lying if I didn’t confess to a little soreness.  However, every time my knees started to throb I would concentrate on “cracking a walnut between my bottom cheeks” and suddenly the pain would go again – simply by reengaging my glutes.

The pros and cons of barefooting

Due to the duration of this walk we took our boots instead of Vibrams.  However, we were very aware that the knots in the soles of our feet were worse at the end of each day as a result of the boots squeezing our feet.  I also noticed that, having now spent much of my day to day life in Vibrams, I was struggling on rough ground.  I’ve lost the knack of “balancing” in my boot on top of knobbly stones so that I went over my ankle a few times.  Perhaps I should still walk in boots sometimes to keep the skill.

At the other end of the spectrum, we received instant relief from tortuous foot pain during the final 2km of the last day’s walking when we hit the final stretch of road and took off our boots, tying them onto our backpacks and walking down the road in socks.  I hobbled for the first few paces but quickly found that the tightness across the ball of my foot loosened out and, by the end of the 2km, the knots in my left calf which had been crippling me at times since a particularly steep climb on day two, had completely gone.

What are my goals?

Finally, I started to think about my goals.  Long distance walking (endurance) and competitive powerlifting (strength) will always be opposing goals.  Over the next few months I’m going to be thinking long and hard about how I might make these work together since I would ideally like to keep both.

Related posts:

1. Powerlifting progress 2010: week forty-five (fat loss: week seven) – holiday
2. Powerlifting progress 2010: week fifty (fat loss: week twelve)
3. Powerlifting progress 2010: week eleven (holiday and active rest)

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