Winter blues

Dear people of the warmer southern states, also substitutable with any warm client readers, you are turds for living in such a reasonably climate-influenced location.

There, I said it.  I am actually resentful that you were smart enough to live somewhere nice while my clearly questionable life choices have led me to a city where the temperature was in the teens this morning.  With wind, single digits.

Why am I whining so much you ask?  Well other than being so good at it (it's on my resume), I was scheduled to run this morning.  1 hour and 40 minutes of pure happiness.

What did I do instead?  Snuggled with my pups and caught up on The Voice.  It was just too cold out to be running and the thought of 1:40 on a treadmill makes me compulsively want to dig my liver out with a wooden spoon.  Damned if you do, damned if you do...

How then, I'd like to hear, do you all deal with the crappy season as an endurance athlete?  I can handle an indoor bike ride, and in some ways prefer it to outdoor riding, but the running is tough for me.

Do you just suck it up?  Do you have a brand of clothing you wear that actually works in these temps?  Do you preemptively light yourself on fire beforehand?

My first race is just over 5 weeks away and some running needs to happen.  While puppy-snuggles are truly superior to most other things in life, a better triathlete they will not make.

Pondering, shivering, scheming...

An article published on interconnectedness

Look how famous I am.  The following is an article I wrote that was published in the upcoming issue of OnFitness magazine (March/April 2014).  I hope the paparazzi doesn't start hounding me again…

Before getting into the definition and discussion of interconnected body regions, let’s first review situations or client experiences that proved to be especially challenging.
Have you ever had clients say things like, “this side of my body just doesn’t work and feel like the other side.”  Or perhaps you give them an exercise but regardless of all the cueing and imagery you can think to offer, their form remains poor.
At times, some clients will complain of discomfort with an exercise that seems mysterious.  Take planks for example.  Some clients complain of low back discomfort with planks that doesn’t improve with positional changes, form corrections, and so on.
Instead of assuming this person or client just shouldn’t do that exercise or eliminating certain movements from their program, consider the following.
When one portion of the body is out of alignment, or not in its neutral position, other parts of the body will have to compensate for that misalignment.
Take for example the foot.  If you intentionally take someone’s foot and externally add a structure that forces that foot into excessive supination, there will be resulting compensations throughout the entire body.
The supinated foot will not remain the only changed body part, but rather will cause a subsequent external rotation of the tibia.  That will in turn cause an external rotation of the femur.  Then the pelvis gets a crack at compensation, and in this particular scenario, will often rotate forward on the side of altered position.  Now you’re up into the spine, which can present with any number of compensations.
That’s the cornerstone of the discussion of interconnectedness.  When one body part changes or is out of proper alignment, the rest of the body must adapt to that new reality.
        The leg bone’s connected to the hip bone
As in the case above, excessive supination of one foot can have a profound effect up the entire biomechanical chain.  For this person described, they might be complaining of lower back pain due to the compensatory rotation.
You can give them the best core stabilization program in the history of exercise, but until the actual problem is fixed, in this case the foot position, their back pain will remain unchanged.
Thinking back to those tricky clients or scenarios that were not changed with proper cueing and attempted form correction, it is reasonable to assume there is an area of the body that is misaligned and therefore causing the problem.
        How do you find the problem?
The answer to this question can get highly detailed and challenging for even the most senior trainers and physical therapists.  Pinpointing the singular biggest positional fault within the entire body can seem a daunting task.
Initially, start with standing posture.  It seems like a terrifically simple thing and potentially not what you’d consider a productive training session, but huge secrets are hidden in someone’s posture.
What you are looking for is symmetry and neutrality.  Think of the body segments as building blocks.  If the blocks are stacked perfectly atop each other, the vertical forces passing through those segments will be distributed evenly.
If you take a stack of blocks and offset one block in relation to the other, that same vertical force will cause the whole stack to fail and come crashing down.
The same applies to the body.  If a person stands with their thorax laterally translated in relation to the pelvis, any vertical forces will cause a site of failure.  Failure equals pain.
As is possible, design your early sessions or part of the prescribed routine to correct these postural abnormalities.  Sometimes simple corrections will keep a person moving a pain free with incredible efficiency.
After standing posture is observed, you should also look at the body alignment during the activity of interest.  If the problematic exercise is planks, assess the posture of the body in that particular position.
Again, what you are looking to find are areas that are not symmetrical and neutral.  Not surprisingly, these problem areas can be anywhere from the toes to the top of the cranium.  What you’re looking for however is the big thing that seems incorrect.
Is the pelvis rotated?  Does one side of the rib cage seem higher than the other?  Is one knee slightly bent when compared to the other?  Is one scapula in a different position than the other?
Once you find what seems to be the most significant positional problem, try to fix it.  This can be done giving the person verbal cues, or even taking a photo of the problem and showing it to them.  Making their brain aware of what their body is doing can make huge changes.
You can also use gentle tactile cues.  If their pelvis is rotated, gently attempt to rotate it back and ask them to hold that new position.
The possibilities abound and time should be spent working on the most notable areas of poor alignment.  If that magical cure doesn’t happen with one correction, get creative and try another.
The body wants to be properly aligned.  It’s how it works most efficiently and when you give that gift to a client’s body, it will be thankful.
Experiment with interconnectedness and how small changes make large contributions to overall biomechanical neutrality.  The answer to those tricky clients is often easier than you might have thought.  Just step back, take a look, and don’t be afraid to make changes.

Swim Camp?!?

For any of you who know me well, a blog entry titled "swim camp" must have you intrigued.  Me going to swim camp is about as likely to happen as Kathy Griffin going to a religious based finishing school.  Let's qualify that as not so likely.

And yet, hold on to your spandex, I did indeed go to swim camp...on purpose! I wasn't even tricked into going.  Forget that, I actually paid for the stupid thing!  What the what?

Think I'm exaggerating?  Here's all the backstory you need: last year before the gun went of for IronMan Mont Tremblant, my swim training consisted of 2 workouts...total.  One was an open water swim in a lake that lasted about an hour, and the second lasted 32 minutes in the basement of a NYC pool.

God how I wish that was dramatically enhanced to make this a better story, but that truly is how much I trained for an IronMan swim.  It went super well, as I'm sure you can imagine.

So now that you know how much I love swim training, picture me on a plane headed to Ft Lauderdale for 3 days of nothing but swimming.  Was I drunk?  You'd better damn well believe it.

I'm about to say something inflammatory.  A truly offensive and disrespectful statement.  I'll likely offend many of you and have certainly offended myself...

I enjoyed swim camp...

Gross!  What a filthy thing to say, right?  I'm ashamed and only hope my Mom is not reading this, never mind my coach.  Imagine what he would do with such information.  He might actually expect me to swim before my next race.  Oooooohhhh, I just got chills!

But you know, there really is something about flying somewhere (warm climate helps) and having nothing to do but pretend you're a professional athlete.  Wake up, eat breakfast, swim, eat lunch, take a nap, go for a quick run, stretch, swim, eat dinner, go to bed, repeat.  I could get used to that schedule.

So the fact that I didn't hate my life and spew curses at my fellow swimmers was pretty surprising, but the coolest part of the whole weekend was some of the company we shared the pool with.

I'm a tattoo fan as you might have gathered and there was some pretty impressive ink on a few of the athletes.  Picture 5 interlinking rings of different colors...  Yep, there were freakin' Olympian level swimmers in the lanes right next to us.

Partly this made us all feel like short, unattractive girls at the school dance who sit in the corner with no one asking them to dance.  Ok, maybe it just make me feel like a short and unattractive girl.  Welcome to my life.  But watching these guys swim was an incredible experience.  Holy hell can they move!

And that was the highlight.  I don't fancy myself someday becoming an Olympic swimmer, as I'm probably more likely to sprout gluten-free baked goods from my nose, but it was pretty amazing to swim with the likes of these dudes.  To see what the human body is capable of.  To see how efficient someone can move when so well trained.  To see how damn good you can look in a speedo if you work out 30 hours a week...

Am I a swimmer? Nope. Will I be super excited tomorrow when I do my obligatory swim session of the day? Highly unlikely. But perhaps, and bare with me here, I just might not hate it.  I just might get in that water and do my workout without whining like a little bitch.

And that my friends is progress.