I got referred to physiotherapy this fall to deal with some knee pain. I had tweaked my knee playing soccer in June. It seemed to get better than the pain started moving around.
I asked around and my cycling friend Marc recommended Emily at Ginger’s Physiotherapy. It’s near my home & my work. Emily is also a cyclist and very cool human so I booked time.
Under Emily’s guidance I was able to quickly recover functionality of my knee. The exercises seemed almost too simple but I couldn’t argue with the results. It was about cajoling my knee to do all the things. First not under load and then eventually working up to one legged negative squats.
Through it all, I confessed I had serious balance issues and all exercises were designed with that challenge in mind.
Once my knee was sorted, Emily assessed my vestibular system. Folks. It is seriously effed and Emily was able to dial in on exactly what I struggle with.
I get vertigo in stairwells. I also feel like I’m bobbing on the ocean in loud crowds. When loud noises, like trains, move past my left side I tilt to the right. I had thought these were anxiety attacks.
So now I am awaiting a referral to an ENT. Hopefully that leads to some imaging. Quite possibly there is a procedure to fix what is damaged in my left ear. WHAT?????
It’s been nearly 30 years since I blew my eardrum flying. Since then I’ve complained of fullness on my left side and vertigo but my concerns were dismissed.
I’m so grateful for Emily’s curiosity and expertise. I have hope that I can actually do stairs with stuff in my hands one day. Already I’m more steady on my feet on icy sidewalks and on my bicycle. Yay!!
I’m mourning a bit about some wasted time. I’ve shed tears and frustration because I didn’t have insight into what situations are more challenging to me than most people.
One example is riding in a peloton. Moving while having a relative fixed point in front of me, like the next cyclist’s butt, is really hard for me to maintain my balance. I always complained I felt very wobbly and that translated to nervous/anxious. Now I understand why that felt challenging.
I’m hopeful that I’ll keep seeing gains under expert guidance.
This experience has reminded me to not have a fixed mindset and just accept challenges as part of some kind of inevitable decrepitude. My good friend Jessica says to complain about your problems to as many people as possible because someone may have a solution. She’s right. If something doesn’t feel right, keep telling people!
It could take 3 decades, but maybe, just maybe there’s something that can be done.
Natalie smiles at the camera wearing a grey toque, yellow scarf and green parka. The background is her cute brick house.
What a month it has been – life as a full-on business woman is very intense. As a reminder, 18 months ago I returned to a career in the finance industry, after a 20 year hiatus where I had children, earned several degrees and then transitioned to professional musician and contract professor… It has been quite an 18 months.
In late July, I realized that I had not yet made it to my favourite Lake Huron beach and was aghast. I was afraid that it was going to be late October and I would be filled with regret about my lost summer adventures. I am lucky that I have supportive management, and flexibility in my working hours, and so I decided to do something – Summer Wednesdays were born.
What are Summer Wednesdays? Well, some of my luckiest colleagues work for companies who have “Wellness Programs” and “Early Release” days that designate half-days off, often on Fridays or before a long weekend. I realized I could create my own personal program (with the caveat of course that I still have to get my work done, just on my own schedule). Summer Wednesdays are my plan to sign off of work early, maybe 2-3pm, on Wednesdays in summer, and drive to one of the gorgeous Great Lakes beaches near me.
So the first Summer Wednesday came and went, and there was just no tearing me away from my desk. So Thursday morning, I put on my bathing suit underneath my clothing, and set down to work. Thrilled, I drove down to Lake Erie and had a truly glorious 4 hour visit, complete with nap on the beach and many swims. So in great irony, Summer Wednesday I was a success, even if it happened on a Thursday.
Summer Wednesday 2 was not so great. I was anxious. I was overwhelmed. I had many excuses and the week slipped past me. So Summer Wednesday 2 earned a DNF.
The smile on my face here tells you what Summer Wednesdays mean to me
Summer Wednesday 3 just happened this week. After not making it last week, I was pretty worried this week. I tried to get more realistic and planned a trip to a quarry about 30 minutes from here. It worked, and I had a wonderfully refreshing swim. (Hilariously I also managed to start a video call to my Vice President when I put my phone in my back pocket. I heard someone calling my name behind me and realized it was my phone. I pulled out my phone – with full view of my chest and bathing suit – and apologized profusely. She said she realized it was a pocket call, but stayed on the call, because she wanted to make sure I was ok. *cue above where I said I have supportive management).
So that’s my check-in this month. I have probably 4 more Wednesdays left in the swimming season, so Summer Wednesdays 4 – 7 represent opportunities for me. I’m curious – how do you prioritize your own self, in the midst of a very busy life? I think I need to keep working on this.
Lake Erie – the muddiest of the Great Lakes, but still a miracle!
I’m struggling to figure out how to keep myself sufficiently active these days. I have a new, intellectually stimulating job that I’m generally really happy with. But it’s working from home, and although you just can’t beat the commute, I find myself far less active than I was in my previous university administration job.
I can’t say I actually miss the 5 flights of stairs I walked up each morning going into work, but I kind of do miss the energy of rushing myself out the door and up to my office for the start of the day.
I get that I have the power within me to go for a start-of-day walk to get me going, but oh my gosh, when I’m learning a WHOLE bunch of stuff for an intense job, I really have been wanting to take advantage of that extra time in my day for sleep or just getting to my desk early.
Sigh.
Last month I wrote asking for suggestions for how to keep active while working from home and I got some great advice – thanks! It boiled down to self-discipline though in some ways.
That is an ongoing challenge for me, in terms of exercise (see: Wait, I Like Exercising?) However, I also am thinking I need to give myself a little space here. I have been at my new job 6 weeks now, and although it’s awesome it’s A LOT. I am back in a career (claims adjusting) I haven’t done in almost 20 years, and I am handling complex commercial losses that are far outside of the kind of work I did previously. Honestly, it’s cool. But it’s also intellectually demanding.
How I feel after a long day reading policies and claims
Maybe I just need to let my brain be my exercise for a month or so? I don’t think that I want a sedentary lifestyle long term, but perhaps it’s ok for a short term? I have been taking time in the day to meditate pretty often. I need it.
I will say, I also have continued to go to weekly yoga at my former workplace. I even got my own yoga mat (thanks colleagues who loaned me theirs!). Even though it’s only once a week, it’s made a HUGE difference to my comfort in my hips. Ideally I would like to be doing that twice a week, but the course teacher only teaches once a week.
At least, though, the yoga helps with my hips and my physical balance. I just walk so few steps in a day…
Of course the other thing that is stealing all the free time I might have had for aquafit and dog walking is my KIDS. It is the end of the year music season for them, and as high school kids they have had SO MANY activities to be driven to and from, and also witnessed. My husband and I share that work, but ultimately it’s really interrupted any sense of rhythm I can develop in my new life.
So that’s me this month: not super active and feeling concerned about needing more balance. Your advice last month was great! How have you worked through crunch times in your life?
So while physio pretty much always begins with painful mobility work, it doesn’t always end that way. Sometimes it ends with dancing to Lizzo.
I was thinking about physio the other day and how I keep going back even though it’s pretty tough going. Lately we’ve been working on leg extension and getting my leg to lay straight. The physiotherapist straps my leg to her table and works on mobilizing the knee cap by pushing it down. At first it doesn’t hurt that much and then it really hurts and then we stop.
After that, it’s over to the gym area for feats of strength and balance. That’s the fun part of physio. We began with pulling a weighted sled backwards. That backwards motion requires full leg extension. After the we moved on to balancing on a bosu ball. You might know how this goes. You start out with both legs on the ball, and then one. Or you start with eyes open and then move to closed. Sometimes Estee the physiotherapist tries to gently push me off the ball.
Last time I was there the physiotherapist one station over was blasting Lizzo and I started bosu ball dancing. The next thing you know we were both dancing. It was fun and a good reminder that physio isn’t all suffering. It also makes sense that Estee ends with the fun stuff.
June 21st is many things. It’s summer solstice, it’s also National Indigenous Peoples Day — a day for all Canadians to celebrate the diverse cultures, unique heritage, and contributions of First Nations, Inuit, and Metis peoples, and it’s International Yoga Day.
Laura is celebrating International Yoga Day with a standing balance flow. She writes, “Are you up for a fun (I think) standing balance challenge? Here is a short (<10 mins.) flow, taught by me.”
Bonus content: her dog Trudy demonstrates a beautiful execution of “Sleeping Dog Pose” throughout this video.
And balance is also in the news days these day as a marker of health.
“If you have difficulty standing on one leg, it could be a sign of something more serious than overdoing it at the office summer drinks party. Middle-aged and elderly people who cannot balance on one leg for 10 seconds are almost twice as likely to die within 10 years than those who can, research suggests.
How well a person can balance can offer an insight into their health. Previous research, for instance, indicates that an inability to balance on one leg is linked to a greater risk of stroke. People with poor balance have also been found to perform worse in tests of mental decline, suggesting a link with dementia.
Now an international group of experts from the UK, US, Australia, Finland and Brazil have completed a first-of-its-kind, 12-year study examining the relationship between balance and mortality. Although the research was observational and cannot establish cause, its findings were striking.
An inability to stand on one leg for 10 seconds in middle to later life is linked to a near doubling in the risk of death from any cause within the next 10 years. The results were published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
The findings are so stark that the researchers, led by Dr Claudio Gil Araujo of the Clinimex exercise medicine clinic in Rio de Janeiro, suggest a balance test should be included in routine health checks for older people.
Unlike aerobic fitness, muscle strength and flexibility, balance tends to be well preserved until the sixth decade of life, when it starts to wane relatively rapidly. However, balance assessment typically is not included in health checks of middle-aged and older people, possibly because there is no standardised test for it. Until now there had been little hard data linking balance to clinical outcomes other than falls.”
I’m feeling wobbly. I’m not quite managing the balance between effort and ease. Could be that I’m finally allowing myself to feel the full weariness of the pandemic, now that we are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel (a tunnel that emerges into an as-yet unknown future). Could be that I’ve been gorging myself on a lot of inputs, between the multiple Non-Violent Communication and Internal Family Systems trainings I’m attending, the practice groups I belong to, plus writing coaching clients, and my own workshop development and writing, plus some deep dive personal development work. That psychic tiredness may be spilling over into physical tiredness, too. But I keep trying to push my way through the depletion into a higher energy state. This tendency is most obvious in my physical activities.
Here’s an example from a few days ago. I woke up in a hole. The voice in my head who likes to tell me I’m not enough was on a tear. Vivienne (that’s the voice’s name and yes, I give the voices in my head names) hadn’t actually taken up much air time recently. I’d almost forgotten how ferocious she can get. I headed out on a run, with the idea of appeasing her. When she’s on a bender, she wants me to sweat first, then get to some tasks. From the first step of my run, I was dragging. About 45 minutes in, I arrived at a short, steep dirt hill, where I sometimes do repeats. I thought, “No, no, no.” Vivienne said, “Oh yes.” I tried to negotiate, “Okay, but just three.” Vivienne said, “Do the full five.” Five is my usual. I did them. Vivienne’s concession in our semi-détente was to allow me to skip the plyometric jumps I do at the end of runs. Mainly, because I’d almost whiffed a jump on my last run (from tiredness). The hill repeats inside of an 8.5-mile run were enough to satisfy Vivienne’s performance standards for me that day. Almost … there was still the Peloton ride.
The post-run ride is a new routine I’ve developed since acquiring the Peloton in December; big help reducing how stiff and sore my legs are after a run. You know that feeling when you get up from your desk chair and your legs feel cramped up and six inches shorter? I don’t get that feeling nearly as much since I started the new routine.
Vivienne and I both agreed that I should not skip the ride, my protection against the creaky feeling. But … I couldn’t muster the minimum 10-minutes I usually ride post-run. I opted for a 5-minute cool-down ride. More, I did not even start at the minimum (yet elevated) resistance level recommended. Vivienne was unimpressed by my output (output is an actualnumber on the Peloton bike). Our truce was cracking. I was trying to convince her that hey-you-got-on-the-bike-and-that’s-what-counts.
After all, a couple months ago I wrote here about the importance of counting the 5-minute Peloton rides, because they are essential to our recovery. This day, my breezy confidence about their worthiness was put to the test. When my ride ended, all the statistics shot up on the right side of the screen, as they always do. This was not a day I wanted to see them. But, before I could swipe them away without looking, I saw it. The badge. Congratulations on 100 rides, Mina. As if to say, “Put your money where your mouth is (or more precisely where your pen was two months ago on this blog)! Not only do the 5-minute rides count. You hit your first big milestone on one.”
Other riders on Peloton organize themselves in advance to make sure they do a milestone ride live, on the hopes of a shout-out from the instructor. Still others plan around hitting a milestone live and on their birthday. But me, I don’t even know the milestone is coming, because I’m not keeping track. And when it does, it lands on the least significant ride I’ve done to date (in terms of effort). It sure felt like the universe was having a laugh, as if to say, “Hi Mina, this is The Karmic Coincidence Squad, remember when you said the 5-minute rides count? Indeed, let the ride be counted!”
Back in April, I wrote that our 5-minute rides are as important as the longer, grittier rides. Perhaps more so. Because they are a gift to ourselves. So, my gift to myself with this 5-minutes was ease. Offering grace to my legs and spirit, on a day I needed some. That is milestone worthy.
But maybe the universe was also telling me to take a closer look at how I’d gotten so far out of balance that a 5-minute ride was maximally taxing. Why am I so physically tired? I haven’t been doing significantly more than usual. In theory, I’ve been running shorter distances and making up the miles with between 10-20 minutes on the Peloton, after my runs. But am I actually running less than I would? And is the effort on the bike equivalent to the effort of running an extra mile or two? Plus, I should note the pre-Pilates spins that I’ve added in, too (which are meant to replace the casual bike ride to and from the studio in pre-pandemic times). Also, often those spinning minutes are intervals, even high intensity intervals. Maybe all those 10-20-minute tag-alongs are wearing me down?
I wrote that last sentence the next day after the milestone. As I watched the words unfurl on the page, the reality settled into my body. I’ve had 5 days now to process the message. A short spin may reduce soreness, but it does not, unfortunately, reduce tiredness. My tag-along spins may be contributing to my depletion. Sometimes a change is as good as a rest. But sometimes we just need rest. It’s time to re-evaluate my routine, it might have lost its balance.
A small bird balanced between two flower stalks, holding on with its toes. I love that one of the flowers is blown out and missing its petals and the other still has its petals–that felt right for illustrating the balance between effort and ease. KT on Unsplash
The fulcrum between effort and ease is constantly changing. Navigating a course through those uncertain waters is a dynamic, evolving practice. Hitting that milestone as I slid off the bike in a state of wet-noodledom after 5-minutes woke me up to that fact. Again.
In the past 5 days, in addition to taking it extra easy on my rest day, I scaled back on the intervals and opted for a couple of slower, steadier rides over the rainy long weekend. After my run two days ago, I spent the time I would have been spinning, stretching instead. And this morning, I hit a personal best on my ride. That felt like the universe offering me a quick reward to reinforce the message.
Recalibrate often. More ease can enable more effort.
