Shoved to Them
I hurt my back last week. It was so sore and painful that I could hardly get out of bed – just a constant ache. My husband kept asking what I had done, and I kept shrugging in reply. I had no idea. I blamed the gym. I blamed our mattress. (We really do need a new one.) I blamed the three-year-old who always wants to be carried or held.
That afternoon, I shuffle-staggered into the gym. One of my fellow coaches took one look at the way I was moving, gave me a knowing smile, and said, “You need to roll out your glutes.”
“It’s my back that hurts. I’m going to stretch and work on it a little before class.”
“Okay,” he said, “but it’s not really your back that needs the attention. You need to roll out your a**.”
I stood there for a moment, and thought about it. He’s a Crossfit coach, an Olympic lifting coach, and a few classes away from his Kinesiology degree…he might be onto something.
I reached for the foam roller, but he handed me the 3 inch PVC pipe that we use for rolling out the big problems. (It’s never fun.) I tossed it on the ground, and then awkwardly sat down on it.
The pain exploded. I gasped at the tightness and cramping in my posterior. The muscles screamed in protest as I rolled and smashed the knots out of them. I definitely whimpered. (I might have cried a little.) The other coach laughed. (Coaches have to have a slight sadistic streak. It’s the law.)
“You’ve been squatting a lot in this strength cycle,” he told me. “When you overwork one muscle group, it tightens up and pulls on whatever is nearby. Unless you have an injury, pain in one area is usually caused by overwork in another.” (I know this, of course. Knee pain is caused by overworking the thighs, elbow by tightness in the forearm, etc. It’s just hard to see it in yourself when you’re in pain.)
It took almost an hour that day to get my butt muscles loosened up enough that I could move. It took a few days of working at it before the pain went away…but it got me thinking about how this “pain theory” works in the rest of my life, not just in my own body.
When I spend too much time and energy working on one part of my life, it causes pain (sometimes crippling pain) in other parts of my life. If I pour my energies into my writing and my coaching, my children become clinging and whiny. Their newfound neediness is the chronic pain of their not being my focus. If I put all of my focus on the children and their lives and education, then my relationship with my husband begins to feel distant and my friends and extended family are neglected.
I’m trying to remember this lesson from the gym, and keep it in my mind that when one area of my life goes awry, the problem probably isn’t in the part that’s not working. I need to figure out what’s been overworked until it’s stressing out everything around it. Because life, like our bodies, isn’t a series of unrelated parts. It’s all connected in some way or other.
photo credit: By Greg Westfall [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
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