Tuesday, July 5, 2011

The pain is gone

Ok, so for the past 5-6 months I've been dealing with shoulder pain. Come to find out, it's tight scalenes that have been pulling on my shoulder. Meeting Bobby my massage therapist, we figured out I was tricep dominant and that was causing the tightening up of the scalenes. Well even with that knowledge I would still end up with shoudler pain. Even with the stretching and massaging the collar bone area, I would still have either a lot of discomfort or just straight out pain in my shoulder. I knew one cause was sleepling on my side. By resting on my shoulder, I would end up throwing all the muscles out of whack. So I would try and sleep on my back, but I would still find myself waking up on my side, and everything Bobby had done had been undone.

I finally figured out that if I placed a pillow under my knees that would keep me from rolling over in my sleep, so that would prevent a lot of the pain. But even after seeing Bobby, I would still have some pain. I stretched and stretched, but finally I figured out how to self massage with a tennis ball on my neck (hint, use a doorway). I've found a couple of knots, worked on them (soooo painful) and for the first time in a long, long time I can say that I'm shoulder pain free. It's been this way for a while now, so I feel safe in posting about it. I'm super glad to have this figured out (for now) because that means I can now turn my attention to my hip pain, which seems to stem from a tight psoas. I've been stretching it and trying some self massage, but I don't think that in itself will cut it.

Regardless, I am so happy to have beaten this thing. My body keeps throwing obsticles at me, but I keep outsmarting it, wait, massage, and end up beating it. Crossfit really can lead to injury if you're not putting in any effort into mobility and recovery, and for me it's been a long, long road, but one that I'm glad to go down. It makes my accomplishments feel that much more significant.

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