This time it wasn’t the training that gave me an injury but the resting!
What you do in your day to day life can have just as much impact on your fitness as what you do in your training sessions. Especially in relation to posture which has such a big impact on injury.
Lockdown 2.0 came as a bit of a surprise to me. And once I’d spent several days dealing with the admin of having to cancel and rebook my work life I settled down to catch up on some writing for our Dips and Chips book. I made great progress but I was at my desk (sitting and standing) a lot.
Then I got a heavy cold. And as my work life was relatively quiet I could indulge in the cold. To be fair I was pretty under the weather so it was great to have the chance to rest, read some books, watch a lot of TV and generally laze about the house in the warm.
When I felt better I got back to work but I still felt too tired to stand up so I spent a lot of time sitting. Badly. At my kitchen table.
All of this sitting with bad posture and not a lot of movement has given me an injury with a lot of pain.
My arm hurts so badly I swear every time I put a coat on, I can’t lift my arm above my head so getting dressed is a challenge and rolling over in bed is military operation.
The upshot of it is that my back and neck have go so locked up from being so static that my shoulder is out of alignment and I now have pain all the way down my arm.
While it’s nothing serious it’s been pretty painful and is probably going to be 4 weeks or so before I can swim again. Thankfully I can afford some sports therapy and a weekly session is making a huge impact each week. During each session I can feel the mobility returning and pain reducing so I know we’re on the right track and it’s nothing serious.
In the mean time I’ll be paying a lot more attention to how I sit, trying to stand a lot more and adding some back mobility into my daily routines.