At the 3-4 week point of my recovery, just as I was starting to feel like I was healing up and ready to get back to something physical I went to bed feeling good thinking I might head out for a walk or do a light strengthening workout tomorrow…but woke up the next morning unable to move my neck. How do you hurt yourself sleeping? I did.
I literally could not turn my neck…from sleeping?!?! At this point feeling really sorry for myself- haven’t worked out for a month and now I’m getting old…whoa is me…I tried to foam roll, stretch, heat and ice. I went and saw our chiropractor, who made it feel better but it still wasn’t gone. I noticed that it improved with ice so every night I started to ice it.
It was improving but in the mean time I was still sitting on the couch and sitting at my desk everyday for hours and hours, doing the “right” thing by letting my body heal and rest. According to the doctor’s orders I still wasn’t supposed to be doing anything physical anyway for another 2 weeks. I was afraid to get back to my workout routine in fear that I didn’t want to make my neck worse and maybe if I give it one more day off it will feel better. So instead of working out I SAT. Days went by and it wasn’t really feeling any better. Still there…so I kept sitting, sitting, sitting…
Lucky for me, our new physical therapist at Results Fitness was starting and I was going to be her first patient. Amy Wunsch, is our full time physical therapist at Results Fitness and is amazing at what she does. Poor thing barely got her stuff set up and I was on her schedule begging her to fix me! By this point it was beyond the 6 weeks the doc told me to not workout and I was ready to go.
I have always thought of myself as a pretty active person who doesn’t have a desk job (hence never even thinking about my desk set up) and I have coached people for years on having better posture, standing up straight, pull your shoulder blades back, engage your core…Plus because of my dance background I have always had ingrained in my body to stand up straight “like a string is pulling up from your chest” and pull your shoulders back. I have even had people comment that I have dancer’s posture more than once.
Well, I was about to get a taste of my own medicine…Over the past 2 months that I had spent sitting on the couch and at my desk my upper back muscles had completely forgot how to fire. I had been turned to the left hour after hour so I had created inflammation in the little muscles attached to my skull. I had the dreaded forward head posture and shoulders pulled forward, the very problem I had made so many of my clients aware that they had from sitting at a desk too much. I was paying the price for SITTING so much! My poor body was a mess because I had spent that last 8 weeks SITTING!
As I started to work with Amy she would tell me- “you need to stretch your chest and get your back muscles firing to pull your shoulder blades back.” Sounded familiar…She also came over and fixed my desk set up and made me aware of my posture. I guess I was spending more time at a desk job than I thought and now I had the posture that I am always trying to correct on our clients…
And I was in pain because of it! It was very hard to have someone else tell me that I didn’t have good posture and needed to work on it by doing exercises to strengthen my back and stretch my chest…definitely a taste of my own medicine. One of my first questions for Amy was- do you think I can workout? She didn’t hesitate, “YES! Please start working out and wake up your upper back with some rowing exercises while you’re at it.” I realized that the worse thing I could do was sit at my desk and that all of those weeks that I thought I was letting my body rest and heal trying to be smart about it, I was perpetuating the problem by being sedentary.
This was a huge Aha! for me realizing that the average person sits at a desk 8 hours a day and that we are so caught up on making sure people are recovering and not working out too often that maybe we need to re-think this and get people moving every single day doing something. The most dangerous thing they can do is sit!
