Day 4.5 – A little bit of a kick – FIT IS A FEMINIST ISSUE

I feel almost completely human today.

However, I know from experience that the first day of feeling better is a trap!

You think you feel like yourself but it’s only in comparison to how bad you felt before. With that false sense of security, you jump right back into the swing of things and find yourself feeling awful again.

So I did not want to fall for that ruse again.

On the other hand, all of this sitting and lying around has left me with a very stiff back and hips. I also knew from experience that movement is the only thing that will help.

So, I figured out a plan that would let me move, do a few kicks and still take things very slowly.

I looked at the exercises for today and realized that they wouldn’t be very intense if I did them separately.

With that in mind, I decided to do a small warm up (mostly to warm up my muscles rather than to get my heart rate up), then do one stretch and one drill. Then, I would wait 30 minutes (you know I used my timer, of course) and try another warm up, another stretch and another drill.

I also decided to make the following rules for myself:

1) If I felt bad at all, I would stop immediately

2) I wouldn’t do the exact exercise that caused the crunch

3) I would modify anything that seemed very hard or required me to move fast

And it worked out fine!

A white woman wearing a green bandana over her light brown hair gives a slight smirk for the camera. The walls behind her are two different colours of green and feature family photos hanging on a frame shaped like a tree. — Small smirk of victory for me today.

I did four ‘sets’ of the warm up/stretch/drill combination over the course of two hours and it felt great.

I had no pain, no dizziness, no weird feelings.

My back and hip stiffness is gone.

I feel really great about it. I had to adjust a few of the planned exercises but I could feel a real difference in my hip mobility during every exercise that I did.

I’m not sure my kicks are much higher yet but they are BETTER and they feel more effective. I feel like I am executing them with more skill.

And, now that my hip mobility is improving, I can clearly see how I need to increase my leg strength to add a different type of improvement.

Bonus: My wall splits* have definitely improved since Sunday! Not a huge amount but enough for me to see and feel a difference.

I’m calling Day 4.5 a victory!

A top-down view of a medium-sized dog with light brown and white fur resting on a green yoga mat that is sitting on a dark brown floor. A person’s right foot can be seen next to the dog and part of their left foot is visible on the left side of the photo. — In case you were worried that I was exercising unsupervised, Khalee stayed close by the whole time.

*The exercise I’m referring to is lying on the floor with your legs up a wall and then doing a sort of split by letting your legs fall open to either side while they are still touching the wall.