My Journey With Health And Fitness – Finding My Balance Again

Yesterday at bootcamp the trainer seemed to think that I needed abs of steel. To be clear, I do not need, nor do I want, abs of steel. Regardless, she put us through a brutal set of core exercises at the end of which my abs were pleading for me to stop. Today it was a circuit and it was with the same trainer. There were 10 exercises on this circuit and we had to go around it 4 times. One of the stations was a bench press where she had me press more than 50% of my body weight. By time I got to the 4th round on that one my arms were shaking but I got it done. Sadly, the fact that I did it made me very proud of myself.

When I had my accident 30 years ago and screwed up my knee I never realized all the repercussions I would experience over the years. Because of the fact that I taught myself to walk without a limp I made a mess of the muscles in my leg. That in turn caused problems with my hips and my back. What it also did was really take away being able to balance well. Boy has that changed.

When I started training to run my coach had me do an exercise each day where I would stand on 1 leg for a certain length of time then switch to the other leg. Eventually I was able to do this without holding on to anything. However, it didn’t fully return my full balance, it just made it better. I knew it wasn’t my best level because I still sometimes lost my balance when walking or carrying things but it was a start.

At first when I joined my fitness centre I was concerned about my lack of balance and some of the exercises I had to do. The ones that I really struggled with were lunges and single leg dead lifts. I was often quite concerned that I was going to fall over. There have been many times where I had to stop and steady myself. And seriously, those single leg dead lifts had me paranoid that I would do a face plant.

Yesterday we were doing lunges with a power knee drive. Basically you do a reverse lunge and as you straighten up you lift up a knee. Trust me back in June I might have gotten through a few of these as I would stop and start trying to steady myself. I watched myself in the mirror yesterday as I was doing this exercise and all of a sudden realized that I was no longer struggling, I had this. That in turn made me realize that I had found my balance again. I know it means that all those muscles that I had abused for 3 decades were all now strong and working more like they should. That in itself is a major accomplishment after less than 6 months.

To me what this ultimately means is I’m back Baby!