Physical Therapy

  I have to say, that after my nearly 3 hour long elliptical session yesterday the muscles in my legs were pretty dead today.  Thankfully, I had planned on taking the day off from any type of cardio what so ever.  Instead, I had a follow up appointment with my physical therapist, Declan, to continue trying to get me over these ITB issues.  The appointment started out like all of the others with some simple stretching aimed at the hamstrings and hips.  After the stretching, we moved to ~ 5 minutes worth of ultrasound therapy.  Like I said in an earlier entry, the ultrasound therapy is aimed at increasing blood flow to the injured / inflamed area to help promote healing.  Honestly, I am not sure if I buy that it works ... but I am willing to try anything.  When I have a free second I am going to have to look into the medical literature to see if there is any evidence for it.  After the ultrasound therapy, came the deep tissue massage.  Honestly, this part hurts like hell.  Its basically when the physical therapist mashes the hell out of the inflamed ITB to try and stretch it out ... it was about 5 minutes of pure pain.  The next step was some slightly more intense stretching aimed more at the hip flexors / thighs.  I think that my flexibility over the past few weeks has definitely increased from doing all of the stretching exercises that I was instructed to do. 
     As this is where my last couple of PT appointments had ended, I thought I was done.  Instead, Declan had a few more exercises that he had me do wit a PT intern.  The next battery of exercises revolved around resistance training / weight training aimed at the hip flexors / extensors.  I have to say that doing these was harder than I thought, mostly because my legs are so out of shape.  My homework was the same as before ... hamstring stretches, hip flexor stretches, ITB stretches and some gluteus medius strengthening.
    Unfortunately, since I am overnight on Tuesday night I won't have time to do cardio.  I am going to try to aim to run 2-3 miles on Wednesday before my PT appointment to give the ITB a little test drive.  Hopefully all goes well.



In all the times I have been to the gym, I never thought I would ever use this machine!  But, apparently my hip adductors & abductors needed some strengthening so it is now part of my routine!

Clamshell exercise aimed at strengthening the gluteus medius.