More Cook Than Gymnast

You really have to be coordinated to take care of your own sore muscles.  This is something I am not, meaning coordinated. Exercise is a major part of my day and I am not one of those women who live to workout.  I exercise for one reason, to lose weight.  I am not particularly interested in having a really tight and hot body.  The time for that is so long past.  I just want to get to a regular size that I can maintain and still get to eat every once in a while.  I do not experience any out of body nirvana from exercise, other things perhaps, but this is a PG rated blog.

Since I have been on the big push to reach my skinny clothes closet contents I have upped my exercise considerably.  Yes it works as long as I combine it with strict portion control and really smart healthy eating, blah, blah, blah – no secrets, no tricks, no short cuts, boring.

My trainer, who I see twice a week for half an hour, you can hardly call that much work out, has upped the weights I lift and the reps I do when I am with her in an effort to help tone, I guess.  Since I am doing the crazy amount of cardio at home I am happy to do something different at the gym.  The only problem is that heavy lifting is making my muscles ache.

I know that aching equals working, but I really hate pain.  Tiff, my trainer told me to get a foam roller so I can roll the pain away at home.  This sounds like a great idea, except that the muscles in my upper thighs that hurt the most are hard to roll when you are a klutz like me.

I have to perch myself on a big foam tube, and when I say foam it is not something spongy and soft, but a cylinder of hard torture.  Once I am lying with one leg on the roller and all my other parts sprawled out to keep me balanced like a seal on a ball, I am supposed to be able to roll my whole large body back and forth with the only contact being the already aching leg muscles on the hard roller.

Needless to say I am not good at this. Twice I have fallen right on my face because I rolled too far and could not stop my forward motion combined with gravity.  I told Tiff this was not working out for me and I needed more help since my leg muscles were about at the point that I could not lower myself onto the toilet without holding on to something.

Apparently the answer was a roller I was much more familiar and adept with, my rolling pin.  Now I take my little used kitchen tool since I certainly am not making any piecrust and push it hard on my sore leg and roll back and forth from where I am told the pained muscles attach to my bones.  Why in the world did no one tell me about this before?  It is so much easier to roll my own muscles in a seated position and not be expected to balance myself at the same time.

I’m sure the foam roller is considered the best option since it take the weight of my whole body and pushes it against my taxed muscle, but since I am not trying to make any Cirque du Soleil team I am just going to use the rolling pin.