Owww You're Hurting Me

My calf was still a little sore so I thought a massage was in order even though I've blasted through my insurance coverage many months ago. I highly recommend Rishi at http://www.therapysource.ca/ .   He absolutely kills me every single time but its well worth it.  I've found that the "usual" massage just doesn't cut it anymore.  The difference is that Rishi offers Osteopathy which goes beyond the usual massage.  He tends  to be a little "rough" but I think its worth it even if I usually beg for mercy at some point.

What is Osteopathy?

Osteopathy is a patient-centred treatment that focuses on the body's innate ability to heal itself. It is an approach to the human body based on the interrelated anatomy and physiology of the body's systems.
Osteopathy uses a manual therapy that is based on a highly developed sense of touch to stimulate the body's natural self-regulating and self-healing capabilities, by locating and correcting the root cause of the disorder.
The World Health Organization (WHO) recognizes Osteopathy as a distinct manual therapy that differs from other health care professions.
Manual Osteopathy is based on 4 basic principles:

Each structure in the body supports the body's functions. If a structure is damaged, out of place or otherwise not working properly, the body will not function at its best.
The natural flow of the body's fluids - lymphatic, vascular, and neurological - must be preserved and maintained.
The human body is the sum of its parts. Its physical, emotional, social, spiritual, and cognitive systems don't work independently, they work in harmony.
When the body has no restrictions, it has the inherent ability to heal itself.

Osteopathy recognizes that a person is an integrated whole. When all the body's components are in balance, a person is complete and can achieve optimal health.

One thing I've noticed is that physiotherapy, massage therapy and chiropractic are all merging together where each "specialist" now offer similar treatment.

Rishi did point out how weak my glutes were and I've been noticing on my longer runs (ie past 1.5 hours) my right butt seems dead and unresponsive.  This has been a chronic problem ever since I've been running over the last ten years as many different therapists have pointed out and I've constantly ignored but since I started racing triathlons I've actually been doing something about it....sort of.  This is where the strength training is suppose to help (when I ever do it) because what happens is that my glutes get overworked and eventually shut down.  The other muscles, like my hamstring, IT band all begin to work harder to try and compensate and that's where things get out of whack.  That's how I know when my knee starts to hurt, I need to work on my butt exercise and so on Thursday morning I decided to start back up with the strength training.  I got back to the basics and did lunges, wall squats, calf raises, abs etc and right now (Friday night), its pretty safe to say I had a good work out because my ass is killing me every time I get up and sit down!


Tomorrow's run of 1:45 should be interesting if not painful however instead of running at my prescribed zone 3 which would be about 5:15 min\km pace, I'll try to run at 6:00 min\km which would be more at Tammy's pace, I hope.