After my visit to the osteopath, I’m reminded again just how important flexibility is to our overall health.  I usually ride my recumbent bike during the winter, but in the summer when I’m doing a lot more yard work, the bike slides down on the priority list.[

One thing the osteopath wants me to do for my knees is to ride a stationary bike for 20 minutes with no resistance.  He says the repetitive motion will help wear down the rough edges on my knees, reducing friction.  Makes sense.  I haven’t been on the bike since before The Grand Tour 2012 in May.  Was I surprised!  That was painful. My tendons in my legs have been bothering me — mostly, they’ve been sensitive to any non linear motion in my legs, which happens a lot more often than you think it does.  But the rhythmic motion of turning the pedals isn’t quite as rhythmic when tendons aren’t sliding.  This is particularly noticeable in my left leg where everything seems to be locking up from above my knee to my ankle.  I start slowly and allow everything to warm up a little, and by the end of the session, I’m getting a pretty good ankle rotation, which feels helpful for the knee.

The osteopath also gave me some stretching exercises designed to loosen up a locked hip cradle.  The right side is particularly bad.  After a week, of one exercise in particular, I’m finally beginning to feel as if I’m able to do the exercise more closely to what the doctor intended.  That’s how tight things were in my right hip.  He was able to do a manipulation in my left hip that loosened something up, so that side goes a touch easier (the toughest part is crossing my ankle onto my opposite knee — that’s extremely uncomfortable).  I hope when I go back for my follow up that these exercises will have loosened things up enough that he’ll be able to do a couple more manipulations to extend the process.  I may show him my iMuscle iPad app to see if he would recommend anything particular in there to work toward.  The app allows workouts to be set up, but I couldn’t find most of his exercises in there.

If you have or suspect you have alignment issues that medication doesn’t really resolve and surgery isn’t indicated for, I would encourage you to consider an osteopath (DO) at least as a consultation.  They can tell you if alignment is an issue or not.  If it is, they may perform some manipulations that seem strange to you (try to relax and go with the flow).  They will also ask you to do some exercises to keep your muscles or tendons relaxed and stretched so your body stays in alignment.

For the last week, I’ve been kind of hobbling around, but I am starting to feel a little better.  My DO was blunt at the end of our visit, that I need to lose a lot of weight — that’s putting my body out of alignment.  I do understand that, but at least he’s working with me where he can help.

The key, even if you don’t see a doctor about it, is to keep moving and making sure you put your body through a full range of stretches and exercise on a regular basis.  When you stop doing that, your body begins to atrophy, and it does it fairly quickly.  Getting it back to working order is hard.  If you can keep it working all along, you’ll be much happier.  If you’ve let things slip, it’s never too late to do something to stop the slide or to improve even a little.