Agoge Fit

So it’s 10 am on a Wednesday and I just popped back into the house.  Why?  Because yesterday, while fooling around on a chin up bar (cold, mind you), I popped my C-6 vertebrae out.  Of course, as a massage therapist, I knew all the right things to do.  I applied ice for twenty minutes several times over the course of the afternoon and evening.  I gave myself a contrasting hydrotherapy before bed and I took Alieve to further combat any inflammation.

This morning I felt a definite improvement but I knew I wasn’t done yet.  After my first client I scheduled an appointment with my favorite chiropractor (Dr. Ellen Witt).  She put me back in place and I can feel the improvement.  As the morning wears on I can feel the muscles of my right shoulder and neck relax and begin to lose their anguished cry of, “Oh Shit!  What was that and why is it happening to us?!”

I’m home because Wednesday is a workout day.  In fact normally I would have finished my warmup by now and begun my bench press sets.  I just saw this killer video from Scott Sonnon and his new TacFit program and would love nothing more than to intergrate some of those exercises into today’s workout.  They would have followed the bench press beautifully.  After that I would have rolled into (pardon the pun) jiujitsu and by one o’clock I would have emerged from the showers feeling well worked with that “tired, but I just really did something feeling” ready to take on my next clients and the rest of the afternoon.

I’m home because I don’t trust myself to stay at the gym.  I want to be better NOW.  I know myself.  I’ll test my limits too soon and prolong my recovery.

It’s all part of what I consider as a drawback to our instant society.  There are benefits to be sure, movies on demand, foods from all over the world just down the street, internet shopping.  Every boon, however, has its price.  Patience, it seems, is one of those.  Patience may well be a virtue, but it’s not very prevalent.  Time waits for no man…and neither do we.

I remember when I first started training this sense of immediate gratification held with me, and in funny ways.  It would prompt me to work extra hard in a workout, as if by the end of it I would be able to see a difference.  Or while focused I would be very restrictive of my calorie intake and be disappointed when at the end of the day I looked the same.

Change is gradual.  True healing is gradual.  It sneaks up on you unnoticed.  Clients will work with me for a few weeks and say, “I just don’t see any difference.”  Of course not.  You see yourself in the mirror, several times a day.  Your brain won’t recognize the changes until they’ve accumulated enough to be significant.  That takes time and consistency of effort.  That takes patience, both with yourself and the work