Sunday 25 March 2012

Day 38 - Yes Todd, stretching is good.

Well it's been ok week, still plugging along on my goals.  The weight seems to finally be starting to plateau a bit, but that's to be expected at this point, I wasn't going to be able to keep up the 2 lb per week gains forever.  The main thing I'm starting to notice though is the dreaded muscle fatigue.  If I'm being honest I started noticing this a couple weeks ago but, as I've said before I'm a bit stubborn so I just kind of ignored it.  If you think about it I've been pushing myself to do 5 days a week of hard cardio for 30-40 minutes along with three 30 minute gym workouts.  It's not surprising my muscles are getting tired.  It's not so much the upper body, but my quads and calves just feel, well tired.  And oh yeah until a couple days ago I was neglecting a fairly important element of any fitness regiment ... stretching.  Now, before everyone out there starts rolling their eyes at me and saying "oh Todd" let me explain myself a little bit.
Historically I've never had much patience for stretching or the whole warm-up thing.  Growing up you always heard "If you don't stretch you'll pull a muscle.".  In truth I always kind of put it in the same category of things adults say like " If you keep making that face it'll freeze that way."  Playing hockey I always hated wasting energy before a game trying to take wicked shots on the goalie or stretching hard in one of the corners.  I figureed I'd rather save my energy for the game.  Instead I'd do a couple of laps, toss a few pucks towards the goal and then hang out at the bench waiting for the opening buzzer.  When I played baseball I never stretched because ... well, c'mon, it's baseball.  And while I stretched a lot when I did track and field and cross country that's because the coaches always led the stretches and EVERYBODY had to do it and it was only on practice days.  On event days though, when the coaches were busy with other things I never bothered.  And to this day my number of pulled muscles due to improper stretching still remains 0.  However, the thing I've noticed is that I'm 32, and while I'm not pulling any muscles, I don't recover with the same speed as I did when I was 14.  And I'm not just talking about the next morning after a night spent with Mr Alkie Hall.  What this means, is that I need to be a little bit kinder to myself.  What I've started doing is some basic stretching before and after exercise the last couple of days and it has already started to help in that regard.  I also found a great DVD we had from when we invested in the whole P90X fad.  There is a disc in the set that I've been using on off days that's just a stretching routine intended for off days.
So, other than my educational lesson in stretching there hasn't been a whole lot else of great excitement in the land of Todd.  However, with the Sun Run and my Hernia surgery less than three weeks away, I'm sure things will be getting more interesting soon.  Oh yeah and my daughters are both walking now ... but that shouldn't change things much ... should it?

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