Hips Don't Lie.. In Fact They Tell You How They are Feeling Pretty Clearly If You Can Understand What They Are Saying

The Shakira song and infamous #bikegang award strikes again... but it's just so relevant here I could't resist.  I like to think I am relatively in tune with my body and I do a fair amount of research on the world wide web to learn more about the various issues I have going on, but the lesson I learned this week is that my PT is totally earning his ridiculous fee and PTs actually learn useful things in school and in practice I can't learn on the internet - I know, shocking. Like how to translate what my hips are saying, for example. Well, it's not that I couldn't understand what was being said... the "fuck you" was pretty clear, I guess where I missed the target was in assuming my piriformis muscle was the one talking when in fact, it was my hips - rather my right hip. The other important skill my PT has is to be able to hear what the hip is in fact saying in between yelling "Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you" That's all I can hear but apparently there is another message in there. Much like a high pitch whistle to a dog, my PT was able to decipher that my right hip has in fact become rotated and as such has caused my right leg to be slightly longer than my left leg and is putting extreme stress on all the big and little muscles in my hip and butt. Sounds awful right? Well it is, but its also really easy to fix. If only I had gotten this diagnosis last week I could be running by now! He did some adjustments and gave me an exercise to do every morning and I should be fine in a couple of days. Of course, this rotation was caused by an underlying issue - the inability to "fire" my left butt correctly - and so once this pain is gone I have several months of work to fix that before I can feel fully functional. The good news is that I am transitioning into half ironman training which means I will be doing more biking and swimming and less running. This more balanced regimen will probably help solve some of my strength imbalances and set be up will a killer aerobic base for the next round of marathon training.. whenever that might be. In the mean time, I am really appreciative that I found a good PT (thanks Shannon!) and promise to cut way back on the self diagnosis.

.