Pretzelling - Session 1

Monday was an interesting day - and a rather painful one! Dashing from work to the biokineticist, I headed off to my first appointment. It was freezing cold (again), but the consultation rooms were lovely and warm, which I was really grateful for!

I was greeted by the squad of biokineticists, 2 of whom were busy torturing (sorry - I mean stretching) clients. My one seemed very excited to see me, and so the session began! I started by walking on the treadmill for 5 minutes, and having not fallen on my face while doing so clearly lulled me into a false sense of security! After the walking, I had to lie down on a mat (a really nice green squishy one) and the biokineticist proceeded to warn me that this would "probably hurt", and began stretching my legs towards my shoulders, across my body and into positions that they haven't really been in for a very long time! Some of the stretches were comfortable, some were uncomfortable, but not painful and some resulted in my eyes watering as some distant nerve or ligament in my knee or hamstring screamed in protest. I managed not to scream while I was being pretzelled, which the biokineticist herself viewed as fairly miraculous. She kept asking if I was okay. My feet kept going to sleep while she was manipulating my legs and hips, which made things somewhat awkward when she asked how things were feeling and I would reply "Numb!". It was painful, but in a good way - and at least she didn't ask me to smile while she was doing all the stretches (my yoga teacher always made us do an impossible pose, where you were about to fall over while stretching some muscle you never knew existed, and then she would tell you to smile. Sadly, she could tell the difference between a smile and a grimace!). She also gave me a whole bunch of exercises to do at home, which should help to speed up the process.

After all this torture, I decided that I would like a detailed explanation of what is actually wrong with me! Basically, the ligaments between my pelvis, specifically, the ilium, and my sacrum are stretched, which is making them moving around, and this is making the surrounding muscles move around, resulting in lots of lower back pain (see diagram below).

So, basically, I have to strengthen and tighten these muscles to fix the problem, hence the weekly biokineticist torture sessions for the next while! Let's hope that I survive!