First Hospital "Gym" Session

Well, I survived. I spent yesterday feeling quite nervous about going to the hospital. I really had no idea how my body was going to react to the exercises and I had no idea what to expect in terms of what I could manage. The strength and ability of my body is still so unknown to me.

I made it to the hospital through the snow and ice and was one of two people working with the physio yesterday. He took us around the equipment, showing us what to do and then left us to do it at our own pace (whilst keeping an eye things).

The circuit was as follows:
5 mins on exercise bike
10 reps glute bridges
10 reps 'press-ups' against the wall (I did this with my feet away from the wall, making a 45 deg angle)
2 x 10 reps leg extensions (can't remember the weight lifted)
2 x 10 reps leg press (can't remember the weight lifted)
1 minute on wobble board
10 reps bicep curls with lower back flat against the wall
20 reps step-ups
10 reps hip abduction, adduction and extension using red theraband
2 mins sitting on exercise ball

My LHS lower back was painful anyway yesterday so it was no surprise that from the bike work onwards it was tight/achy. However, I was very careful and caused as little extra pain as possible. I came home and iced it, which helped.

The bizarre thing about all of this is that even doing the circuit, it all felt easy. My brain was telling me 'this is nothing, I could do this in my sleep'. But, in reality, once I was home, I could feel my body had 'worked out' and I was tired. There is no way I could manage anything more demanding or brutal. That was my maximum and yet, that was way below what my brain thinks is do-able. I can't seem to accept or understand that even though my appearance hasn't changed, the internal make-up of my body has obviously changed dramatically. I am a looooong way from being the person who could play county hockey or 2 hours of tennis or not really think about how many reps I did at the gym.

It does seem to me that the scale for recovery is enormous. What I mean is that we're not talking about getting from 0 to 10 in terms of strength/fitness. It's more like getting from 0 to 5000, where each increment of '1' takes weeks and sometimes months to bring about. I'd say I'm at about 1000 for my lower body, a fifth of the way towards reaching normal strength/fitness. For my upper body, I guess I'm at about 500, just a 10th of the way there. It seems that the complexity of the nervous and musculoskeletal systems mean that innumerable mechanisms and architecture need to be brought online, trained, synchronised, strengthened and so on before it's all up and running properly. And, it takes a long time! My shoulders and upper body have quite a way to go yet.

I slept until 10am. I feel ok today. I'm aware my legs worked out yesterday but I'm not really stiff as such. The LHS lower back tightness/pain is 'there' but only minimally, which I'm very pleased/surprised about. All in all, so far, so good....