Take some time to think about yourself

*****

Go back four or five years and I was on the traditional carb-heavy active person’s diet (porridge each morning, pasta salads and bakes for lunch, pasta and rice-laden meals at dinner).  I was living in my trainers, had lots of stress from day to day, plenty of cardio through walking and cycling, no weights, no supplements.  I couldn’t even overhead press an empty dumbbell handle weighing a hefty 1kg.  As for my body weight, I had weighed 50kg for about 10 years, despite being 5’6”, with it never going either up or down.

Sound familiar?

Since then I’ve been through a journey of discovery.

I’ve converted to an almost carb-free existence for a while to learn to be a fat-burner, I went strictly paleo for long enough that I can now get away with the odd non-Paleo diversion from time to time but know that I’m looking after my body the rest of the time.

I care for myself better, both mentally and physically.  I have learned to control my stress levels better and know how to recognise my stress characteristics and manage them.  I can feel different muscles in my body working with an awareness I never had before and, as a result I can use self-massage techniques to keep my body feeling as free and relaxed as possible.

Elsewhere in my life I’ve converted to living in Vibram KSOs whenever I can get away with them.  I still cycle and walk a huge amount but I balance it now with a programme of lifting weights.  I’m push-pressing a 20kg kettlebell for reps, squatting safely over my national qualifying weight (with the BDFPA) and happily hip thrust 140kg for reps.

As for my body composition, I’ve gained an enormous amount of muscle and struggle to keep my weight near 56kg because my love of food, when put alongside the hours I spend sitting still in my desk job mean that it tends to drift up a kilo or two at times, despite the fact that I’m carrying less body fat than I was when I weighed 50kg.  I definitely can’t fit my quads, hamstrings or glutes into any of the jeans I used to wear (which is actually a bit frustrating, but never mind).

*****

It’s a lot of changes in a surprisingly short space of time and that’s just what I’ve achieved without removing the full time desk job from my life.  I expect that a lot of others who read this blog have come through similar journeys of self-discovery and change in the recent past.

Have you adopted some changes to diet, training or lifestyle and seen similar massive changes and benefits to your overall being?

No related posts.

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

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

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 instruments of torture to get myself back in working order

Identifying the cause of new knots and sores

What’s changed to suddenly cause this? 

Mostly I put it down to a concert I was playing in at the weekend.  After a couple of months not playing a violin I was suddenly doing a couple of hours practice a night for a few nights.  Playing the violin is possibly one of the most twisted and unnatural postures in existence and several hours of getting my fingers back into the groove quickly created tensions in different places to normal. 

But the knots started to form before that so it wasn’t the only culprit.

Another possible cause was my new laptop.  My work laptop is upgraded every three years and my return from holiday heralded the arrival of the cutest and tiniest laptop I’d ever seen.  It’s perfect for all the travelling that I do with work, since it weighs a fraction of my old one, but there are some vital differences to the old laptop as well.  The keyboard is slightly smaller and, importantly, the screen is much smaller.

Lookout for unexpected changes

Lots of things change in our lives.  Often they are small incremental changes or tiny changes that you wouldn’t think would impact on you.  For example, if I had changed from a desktop computer to a laptop computer I would have been instantly thinking about how this might change my posture at the desk and the extra things I would need, such as a stand for the computer and a separate keyboard for when I am at my base office, rather than on the move.

Changing my laptop though, I didn’t even think about it.  It was only when I started waking up with a stiff neck every morning and established that I was suffering from shortening of the muscles that are used to look down that I thought about what had changed.  The new laptop was smaller.  So much smaller that the platform I previously used to stand it on was no longer high enough.

Once I’d rolled out the knots and started putting my laptop up on a few books (on top of the platform) the problem seemed to stay away.

Always be on the lookout and assessing

When I first started out doing weights and looking after my body in a more careful way I went through a critical assessment of everything that I did in life.  I considered where my posture or activities could negatively impact on my muscles or other areas of my life and set about rectifying the problems.

Since that initial session though I have been lazy at keeping track of what changes and how it may have a subsequent impact on my body. 

Something I learned this week was that I can never afford to get complacent.  I should always be assessing what things have changed in my life and how these changes might impact on me.  Even the small changes.  That way I don’t lose time doing restorative work and rectifying the damage.  Instead I can concentrate on doing the things I love all the time.

After all, who wants to spend all their time battling against knots?

Related posts:

1. Lessons learned: side-effects of building muscle
2. Lessons learned this week: injuries and basic anatomy
3. Lessons learned: improving posture

Exercise on the holiday

The holiday involved a significant amount of cycling each day.  The truth is that we were actually only moving the pedals for 4-6 hours over the course of 8 or 9 hours each day – this was no Tour de France – but with a bike that is heavier than my usual racing bike and additionally weighed down with touring gear this was a significant effort output for my legs.

Cycle touring - no Tour de France but still requiring muscle adaptations

By the end of the fourth day I was beginning to get a sore knee caused by knots that were starting to form in my right quad muscles.  I made a concerted effort to massage the knots by hand overnight which reduced the soreness for the fifth and final day.  A follow up rolling effort once we’d returned to the car (where we’d stowed a foam roller) and made it to our hotel for the night made a real difference to the knots and by the next morning a brief rolling session showed that the knots were mostly cleared.

The subsequent problems

After returning home I spent the whole afternoon standing up doing the washing, ironing and tidying up.  We’re doing a bit of a rearrangement of the house so I spent several hours standing in front of a bookcase reorganising books – I’m a bit obsessive about having books organised into alphabetical order.  As the afternoon wore on my legs started to stiffen up.  I thought it was the knots coming back but a rolling session didn’t reveal any knots.

A special treat post-holiday pizza and cheesecake evening (yes, I know – distinctly not paleo) followed and I went to bed stuffed full, satisfied but a little sore.

The next morning I woke up and I can only describe the way my legs felt as “puffy”.  It was similar to the sensation that you get when you suffer from a severe insect bite or sprain where the swelling is so extreme that it starts to be constrained by the skin.  It’s incredibly uncomfortable.  I was still able to walk but the legs of my shorts were tight on my thighs and kneeling down or standing still for too long created additional discomfort.

Call me excessive but it almost felt like my skin was going to split to release the pressure at any moment.

What I think happened

I hadn’t done much cycling before the tour, having only managed to fit in one or two rides of two hours each in the weekends leading up to the holiday.  The sudden increase of cycling effort was therefore a shock to my quads.  They may have been strong from the squatting I’ve been doing, but squatting and cycling are very different activities.

To handle the cycling it is likely that my muscles rapidly developed additional capillaries to enable my body to supply my muscles with blood to help wash toxins away from them and to provide the muscles with plenty of oxygen.

By spending the afternoon after we got home standing up rather than moving about the blood will have filled up all the capillaries, thanks to gravity, and the additional blood would have swollen up the capillaries.  The intake of significant amounts of carbs that evening would then have contributed to the swelling in my legs by replenishing glycogen stores in my muscles.  So my legs really were swollen.  The combination of additional blood and filled glycogen stores will have made my legs larger than ever before and my skin wasn’t prepared for the increased girth.

That’s my theory and if it’s right then it’s a real warning about the possible side effects of significant changes to exercise patterns and subsequent rapid changes to muscle composition.  Do you think I’ve hit on the right reason for the puffy sensation in my legs?

Related posts:

1. Lessons learned: regular physical assessment
2. Lessons learned this week: the sleepless side-effect of dieting
3. Lessons learned this week: injuries and basic anatomy

Posture should be of huge importance to everyone.  Not only does good posture give you the ability to really show off your body, it also helps to prevent chronic long-term injury to your body.

A particularly prevalent result of poor posture in women is dowager’s hump.  That well-recognised slouch where the lumbar spine curves in and the thoracic spine folds over.  For an excellent image see the article by John Izzo which highlights some ways in which personal trainers can help clients address this problem.

Over the years I’ve used various techniques to try to prevent lasting damage to my posture.

Dance

Up to the age of 11 I did a lot of dancing.  However, if you want to turn to dance for postural improvement you should also be aware of the hazards.  A study by Twitchett, Koutedakis and Wyon pointed out some problems that female classical dancers suffer from.  Especially since they often elect to avoid strength training:

• limited aerobic fitness despite needing a strong aerobic foundation;
• weaknesses in the upper body, torso, hamstrings and quadriceps (though incredibly good hip mobility, which is something most of the rest of us suffer from); and
• low body weight and low body fat to meet aesthetic demands, often met through low caloric intakes due to insufficient energy expenditure which in turn can increase the risk of injury (poor nutrient balance etc).

Yoga

When we moved and I had to stop dancing I replaced this with yoga.  Knowing what I now know I would no longer do the more “flexible” yoga poses, but some of the postures helped me reverse damage being done by the numerous hours spent sat at a desk studying. 

Use of selective yoga postures is a good approach to both relaxation and posture assistance. 

Posture-specific treatment

I also play violin.  The posture of many violinists is almost guaranteed to create injury.  It can be avoided but for violinists like me, who start learning at a very young age (I started when I was four), you contort your body to imitate those you see.  Very few people are lucky enough to have a teacher who corrects the postural problems before they are ingrained and injuries like tendonitis and misalignment of the spine are subsequently common amongst young violinists.

In my mid-teens I had to stop playing for 3 months due to twist in my spine that caused the bones in my lower arm to be pushed out of position and resulted in a form of mild tendonitis.  This was my introduction to how every part of the body is interconnected and it was resolved with an intensive course of treatment and exercises from a musician-specialist chiropractor and applied kinesiologist. 

I learned that if you want effective treatment you need to see someone who understands the causes and Elizabeth Andrews, as a former professional viola-player, perfectly understood the postural problems of playing a stringed instrument.

Alexander Technique

As a preventative measure, many musicians turn to Alexander Technique. 

F.M. Alexander was an actor whose career was temporarily halted when he suffered from severe voice-loss whenever on stage.  After studying the changes to his posture when performing he found that his performance posture created tension in his neck and body so he found ways to change the ingrained postural and movement habits.  By applying the technique people learn through simple and practical measures to improve their movements, balance, support and coordination and they also learn to be in communication with their bodies.

For a treasure trove of information about the Alexander Technique I recommend watching and reading some of the links on the Complete Guide to the Alexander Technique.

Relearning a hard lesson

Once I left school this attention to my posture mostly died away so that when I started lifting a few years ago I was a mess.  I needed to act to undo years of desk-job damage.

Introducing assistance exercises

I’ve written before about using rolling and mobility drills to help undo postural problems.  There are also some key assistance exercises that can be built into workouts which will not only build strength but will also improve posture.

In the last few weeks I’ve see particularly good results from the Romanian Deadlift, which has provided me with more hip mobility than ever before.  So much so that this has become a permanent exercise in my workouts as long as I continue to do a desk job and spend hours of every day sat down.

In addition, bent over rows have given me excellent improvement in my shoulder posture.  I’ve noticed that my shoulders naturally sit further back and my lats have been more dominant which has helped me control the dominant traps which previously caused me to suffer from hunched shoulders after long hours at work.

Keeping on the right track

Poor posture is something I will always try to keep a wary eye out for now.  I’ve addressed some of the worst problems from my desk job, but I’ll need to keep checking that other elements of my posture are not slipping.

What postural problems do you suffer from and how have you addressed them?

Related posts:

1. Lessons learned: regular physical assessment
2. Lessons learned this week: developing mobility drills
3. Lessons learned: office survival

I’ve already set out the tools I would recommend you have in the ideal self-massage toolkit, but I failed to explain why you need such a variety.

The kit

The kit can be neatly split up into two categories:

• Balls (and related round objects) – good for small muscles or for muscle points that are surrounded in other muscle or bones (to hold the ball in place).
• Rollers (and related stick-like objects) – good for muscles that stand out from the body, such as quads and calves.

A selection from our self-massage kit

Rolling balls

Balls are great for massaging anything that is in a confined area or where you need to get in deep between other muscles.  All you have to do is sit, lie, or stand in such a way that the ball is between the knot and the ground and your body-weight is, as far as possible, being directed through the ball.  Simplicity itself!

In particular, I use them for:

• Soles of the feet (plantar)
• Glutes
• Spinal erectors (using two tennis balls stuck together with climbing tape and rolling them up and down the spine with one on each spinal erector)
• Back (they’re particularly good for getting at muscles that lie underneath other muscles or shoulder blades)
• Shoulders

Where I struggle to use balls is on muscles like the quads or calf, where they can easily roll off sideways when they meet a knot.  There is nothing more frustrating than lying on your front, face buried in the carpet (finding that it hasn’t been cleaned for the last month – housework is not my forte), while trying to force a tennis ball to push into a knot just above your knee.  It starts out fine and then, inevitably, the ball pops out to the side as soon as you apply pressure.

Ball variations

The different balls provide variation in hardness and size.  For beginners I recommend sticking with the tennis ball.  Tennis balls have a surprising amount of give in them.  While it will probably seem like agony when you first roll with a tennis ball, the surface of the knots will soon soften up and you’ll need to progress to something a bit firmer. 

This is where the hockey ball and golf ball come into their own with each size being suitable for a different body part.  The golf ball is great for the soles of the feet, but useless when trying to get under the shoulder blades, since it disappears under the blade, never to be seen again.

Actually, that could be a really cool party trick…

Foam rollers and other long stick-like objects

These are fantastic for rolling those pesky quads, calves, triceps and other muscles that stand out from the body and therefore don’t have “sides” to hold a ball in place when you are applying pressure. 

The only exception to this is the glutes.  For some reason (body fat?  complexity of the glute muscle structure?) the ball tends to stay in place while you apply maximum pressure, allowing the ball to get into the underlying muscles.  Trust me – sitting on a hockey ball and then rolling about can be pretty excruciating!

Roller variations

Rollers with a big diameter serve a dual purpose since they are also good for thoracic spine stretches.  Meanwhile those with a smaller diameter (hence my request for pipe lagging for Christmas) are better for shoulder posture (lie on your back with the roller down the length of your spine and let gravity pull your shoulders back towards the floor).

I mentioned in my last post that you can use a roll of tuna tins in place of an expensive foam roller, but be warned.  They can be fiercely solid!  You may need to try out various thicknesses of towel wrapping (folded 2, 3 or even 4 times before being wrapped round the tins to provide a suitable cushion) to avoid getting too bruised in the process.  We ended up getting the foam roller because Chris got weird blood-blister lines where the joins between tins traced down his body!

The fat complexity

An observation: when I first started rolling I had a lot of body fat covering my glutes.  It was easy to sit on the ball and for the ball to never actually reach the muscle to get a decent massage. 

When choosing the correct size piece of equipment you need to take into account how deep it is going to have to go before it will reach the muscle. 

Go out and massage yourselves!

Hopefully you now feel well-armed and able to get out there and start a thorough massage routine with the most basic of DIY massage kits.  Shun the expensive massage tools that relatives may want to give you for Christmas (unless it’s those funky pig ones). 

The biggest key with self-massage is to play about with different bits of household equipment and positions/techniques until you find one that really gets at the knot you’re working on.

As a helpful starting point, Chris has recently done some posts about techniques for rolling shoulders and legs and using the kit to improve thoracic spine mobility too.

Let me know how it goes!

Related posts:

1. Self-massage toolkit
2. Self massage for a busy life
3. The importance of soft tissue work

I could easily get this myself from the local DIY shop, a few metres of it would only cost 30p, but it’s always good to ask for things you really want and to accommodate smaller budgets on your wish list.  I was once sent a wedding gift list which had a pair of kitchen scissors on it – the couple in question have said that, five years down the line, these are still the most utilised and appreciated wedding present they were given.

So why the pipe lagging?  I know it’s a cold winter, but even so…

The tools you don’t need

Massager or child's toy?

If you search on the internet, you quickly find that there have been numerous tools designed for the self-massager.  These range from tortuous-looking wooden devices covered in spines, through to more sensible looking things.  In fact, while looking for a tortuous picture (the ladybird was the best I managed), I came across this handy summary of some of the tools of the trade.

Frankly, I was actually quite shocked when I saw the prices quoted on that page.  I’m well aware that this is the festive home-comforts season when people are given such things as a hand-held back massager or the (really very cute) Hug-me Pig Foot Massager so it was time to redress the balance.

The DIY self-massager’s toolkit

Self-massage doesn’t need to be expensive.  I can massage almost every part of my body effectively and we’ve spent less than £20 on equipment (and almost all of that was on the single foam roller that we finally invested in).

A selection from our self-massage kit

I would recommend that for the full toolkit you should eventually aim to collect together the following items:

• Tennis ball x3;
• Climbing tape, to tape two of the tennis balls together;
• Hockey ball;
• Baseball – optional and more expensive, but also useful since it’s a bit bigger than a hockey ball.  We cheated since ours were a gift from someone who’d been given two presentation baseballs and didn’t really want them;
• Golf ball – again, ours was free by picking it up on a local walk that passes a golf course;
• Foam roller; and
• Thick pipe lagging (the kind with a small bore hole down the middle).

The pipe-lagging is the one precious bit of equipment that I’m still missing and that I’m struggling to cope without.  My shoulders have adapted to work round the foam roller and now I’m looking to fine-tune with something a bit thinner.  (Do you think I’ve dropped enough hints to my present buyers yet?)

The cheap DIY self-massage toolkit

If your budget is a bit tighter, then you could start out with the following list.  I think of this as the “Starter Self-Massage Kit”.  It’s got the bare bones that you need to get an effective massage over the whole of your body and is perfect when there are still plenty of big knots to deal with.

• Tennis ball;
• Hockey ball;
• A pack of 4 wide tins of tuna (or similar), taped together if they aren’t still in their multi-pack wrapper;
• A towel (to wrap round the tuna tins and soften it up a bit – thus creating a foam roller); and
• A rolling pin (if you happen to already own one – don’t invest in one just for this since the tuna tins will do).

This second list also doubles up as our holiday massage kit. 

On active hotel-based holidays (eg. ski trips) we take plenty of multi-pack tins of tuna with us, a tennis ball and a hockey ball.  As the week progresses, our quads and calves loosen up and require less rolling.  Since we are also usually eating a couple of tins of tuna each day there is usually insufficient tuna to do any rolling on the last two days!

How best to use your self-massage toolkit

Really this deserves a post of it’s very own so I’ve decided to dedicate the next post to this important topic.

Meanwhile, let me know what’s in your self-massage kit.  Are there any obvious omissions from my current toolkit?

Related posts:

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