16: Ouch!

A couple of weeks ago, whilst preparing to go to Luke Bremner Fitness, I became aware of a slight pain in my right hip. I didn't think too much about it and, as usual, walked briskly uphill from Edinburgh's Stockbridge to Luke's private training studio in Jamaica Street.

After changing and doing a general warm-up, Mr Bremner started to show me some new exercises that he'd incorporated into my home workout routines. As we went through these together, I became aware that the pain in my right hip was increasing.

"It could be something to do with your IT band." Luke said.

Not knowing what he meant, I assumed he was referring to the resistance bands I used at home for exercises like rowing practice. Thankfully he went on to explain what the Iliotibial tract, or 'IT band', is and its function. His final thought of that session was "Let's keep an eye on it!"

I returned the following Thursday and started my hourly session with some squats. However there was little improvement with my right leg. Instead of making things worse, Luke took swift action and decided that we should spend the remaining time looking at foam-rolling and muscle stretching techniques.

Up until then I'd only used a foam roller for thoracic spin exercises. So to start with Luke demonstrated some foam roller exercises that would help to alleviate the pain in my IT band.

Often when I'm the process of doing the final rep of a final set in the gym I let loose a lion's roar that's inside me. However these new exercises had me yelping more like a wounded pup!

We progressed to using a tennis ball to massage other muscle groups in the feet, chest and shoulders. Each exercise seemed to hurt more than the last, so much so, that by the end of the hour I'd almost forgotten about my original IT band problem.

Luke's advice was not to do any more home workout routines. Instead I was to focus on the foam rolling and stretching exercises, which I've been doing diligently. As each day passes, not only does the IT band in my right let become less painful, but the exercises themselves seem to hurt less too.

In order to allow my leg time extra time to recover, we spent last week's workout sessions looking at mobility and posture. As always I've been given excellent advice and techniques by Mr Bremner on how to improve these too.

Yesterday I finally started to lift serious weights again and my right leg, although not 100%, held-up to the challenge pretty well. There's no doubt that all the stretching and rolling I've been subjecting my body to over the past fortnight has really worked. More importantly I'm now doing many of these exercises daily in order to prevent something like this happening to me again.