It’s been a pretty long time since I wrote a blog, and at
risk of succumbing to the new year/new start cliché, it seemed an apt opportunity
for a self-indulging account of the past 8 months, and a view to the next few.
The last time I wrote back in April I was awaiting the
results from an MRI scan and preparing for the race season with my new team at
23c-Focus. Whilst the scan ruled out any disc issues, there were no obvious
related causes either. The inevitable physio safety net of core training was
offered as the NHS solution to treat the problem they didn’t know existed. “Well
it won’t do any harm, will it”. Seems legit.
In fairness, I’d seeked private help with Scott at Benfleet Physiotherapy, one which I thoroughly recommend, and after a series of tests was
informed I had the worst core stability of any athlete they had ever seen, and
not far from that of a middle aged woman. It seems 5 years of the Sleep. Eat. Cycle.
Repeat. lifestyle did my body no favours; it wouldn't be far from the truth to
say the furthest I’d walked in that period was from my bed to my bike. Who’d
have thought it?
Disappointingly to myself and the team, I didn't start a
single race last season. After 11 months off the bike and endless, mind-numbingly
boring core exercises, I had made frustratingly little progress, other than my
1RM bench press. The gym monkey in me was beating it’s way out and cutting away
at my soul every time I attended the gym. I’m not proud to say, we (housemate
and fellow ‘former’ cyclist Mikey) even did shoulder day. Once.
However, my friend, bike fitter and “the (second) best cyclist in
Loughborough” Sandy King, provided a ground-breaking breakthrough after a sweaty evening of questionable hand placement. Make of that what
you will. It transpired that during the
pedal action and subsequently emerged throughout life, I’ve been
under-activating and completely under-reliant on my gluets, I suspect in favour
of the smaller rotational and stabilising muscles deeper in the hip and hence suffering
issues relating to my piriformis muscle, sacro-illiac joint and sciatic nerve. No
quantity of core training was going to overcome the loss of stability with an
essentially unused gluet. That’s just science.
Anyway, to cut an already long story short, the gluet activation
work seems to be doing the trick, for now. I’m back on the bike, and back
over-training.
Some of us will never learn. Watch this space.
