Marching Into The Peace Corps, pt 12: The Spirit Is Willing But The Flesh Is Weak
by There are many obstacles that can slow you down or derail you completely when it comes to changing your health, and an injury in the pursuit of a goal is high up on the list. It is a setback that doesn’t have to mentally defeat you, and you have the power to choose.
The Internet is quite a source of information, albeit, not always accurate, but that’s why you read multiple pages on the same subject from different sites. Medicine doesn’t always agree with itself, so I’m not that worried when it comes to researching information on the Internet. Well, after doing some reading, I discovered a site that told me the difference between a strain and a sprain and it directly mentioned the “pop” I had heard and felt. I had strained or torn my calf muscle, and that’s not good news.
This affects everything I want to do because it could mean healing in the best case, in two weeks, or as much as three to four months! No cardiovascular exercising, limited stretching and strength training! I have to be very careful to avoid re-injury of the muscle, which I’ve already done a few times. At this point, I’m feeling a bit low because I’m already seeing my metabolism slowing down with no activity, but if I don’t care for the muscles now I’ll definitely be in greater trouble later.
I didn’t realize I needed to warm up for walking, and I wasn’t power walking. I did throw in the occasional 100-foot jog, but that only started to happen in the last two sessions of exercise. Whenever I’d get home, I was responsible and hydrated myself as well as crawled into a hot bath to heat up the sore muscles and soothe the blisters.
What I used to look forward to is now something out of reach at the moment, and I’m going to have to rethink how to do a workout without any stress on the calf muscles so as not to stress them. Currently, I’m waddling like a duck because I can’t roll on the ball of my foot while walking, and that’s placing an undue amount of stress on my lower back and hips. The only types of exercises I can do would be upper body strength training.
Like all obstacles, I’ll figure a way through this with God’s help and a bit of reading to find adaptive exercising I can perform. One thing I’ve learned from this lesson: start a good stretching program BEFORE you engage in a walking program! When my leg heals, I won’t race back to walking at all, but will work on a stretching program to create flexibility in the muscle so I won’t be sidelined again.
If you don’t like trying to find all the segments of this series, you can locate the links to them here and they will return you the exact spot on the socyberty.com site.
quazen.com articles by this writer can be found here
socyberty.com articles can be located here
relijournal.com articles are here
picable.com photographic images are here
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