Tuesday, August 5, 2008

A Few Stretches To Grease The Hip

As I mentioned before, I've been told that my right hip is higher than my left. Today I met with David Harper of OMNI Physical and Aquatic Therapy in Wallingford, and he gave me a series of exercises that will hopefully loosen up the muscles keeping my right hip tight and off kilter.

He also gave me a strange exercise that I do with a tennis ball which forces me to breath in a new way. It feels good and....expansive, if that makes sense. I've been doing yoga and breath exercises for a long time, and this is definitely in a different category.

We also went running together, and he explained some of the training he wants me to do.

One of the things I need to work on is rolling from my heel to my big toe as I run. I find doing this uses a whole new series of muscle in my leg. It also seems to reduce some soreness I had been getting in my ankles, but it's too soon to say for sure.

I have to mentally force myself to consistently do it or I forget and revert to my old stride, which falls in the middle of my foot.

I'm not exactly sure how far we ran, but I I think it was somewhere around four miles.

I'm interested in testing my heart rate, and was loaned an old HR monitor to do this. I just need to rustle up some batteries.

I actually think I was under guessing on my speed earlier. I may be going significantly faster than 10 Min Miles, but I'll have to do a real check to be sure. I used to be able to maintain six-minute miles for 20 minutes on a treadmill in college, though I would be quite tired afterwards.

This is way too fast for an endurance race, though.

Anyway, I'll post more tomorrow.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Andrew we ran 5 miles today, Tuesday 8/05/08, including warmup from where we left at front of Omni to where we returned, which was again in front of Omni.
-Dave Harper

Running Raw said...

Thanks David.

A California Girl said...

I am so entertained by how "in the process" you are! When I trained for a marathon I had to know distance and speed after each long run. You are obviously very purely motivated which is great! When you get your Garmin it might be a whole new world!

Running Raw said...

Yeah. I'm getting it so I can track these things more scientifically. I actually thought I was running a 10 min/mile pace when I was actually closer to 8:30, so it's probably a good idea.