You have to crawl before you can walk

Before you read this post, try to get up from your chair. Or even better, try to do a squat. What muscles did you use? Your quads, your glutes, combo of the two? Think about it for a second.

I had a fitness assessment last night, and the results were actually very good. My BMI is good, my body fat is good, my weight is good, heart rate, all good. I was thinking I was ready to learn about how to increase my muscle mass (I'm hoping to lose six pounds of fat and trade that for six pounds of muscle in time), and then the trainer had me do some push ups.

Before anyone hauls out trainer conspiracies and personal training session pitches, he's very well qualified and he very effectively illustrated what is wrong and what needs to be changed.

So if I'm in as good shape as I seem to be, what would I need to do to improve? Let's go back to that getting up/squatting thing. When I do those motions, even when I walk or climb stairs, I am only using my quads and some muscles in my hips. Those huge glute muscles that are there to provide the strength you need for walking, squatting, an other good things, well they're doing pretty much nothing on me. Like nothing. They just sit there and wait with open arms for the sagginess of my age-related metabolic decline.

The trainer asked me to try standing up using my glutes and I couldn't do it. It wasn't like I didn't have the strength. There was just no ability to do it. It was like my brain sent a message to my central nervous system and all that was there was an Error 404 message. It feels a lot like it feels when I try to wink with my left eye. I can't do that either.

And what's worse is that the way I move now actually makes my knees worse and is causing my hip muscles to become over developed. Meaning I'm actually making my hips bigger because of the way that I walk.

So I'm hurting myself by doing this. He pressed down on the leg and hip muscles that were over-developed and I was actually yelping in pain. I'm pretty sure this man could have killed me with his thumb judging by his ability to find my weakest spots. Then he got me to stand up and posed me in a position where I was actually standing up properly, but because my glutes are so weak I almost fell flat on my face.

So how did I learn all this fundamental walking, standing up, sitting down stuff wrong? One theory is that because I didn't crawl as a baby that I didn't learn to use my butt muscles for that kind of movement. I just sat there for 13 months and then decided to stand up and walk one day.

As I grew and my knees got bad, I would try to walk in a way that would make them as quiet as possible. I also try to walk as lightly as I can. I basically walk on my toes all the time as I don't want to make a lot of noise. So that didn't help either.

I have been told that teaching my glutes to do the work will actually improve the condition of my knees and anything I can do to improve that while staving off orthopedic surgery is a totally worth a try. Also once my hip muscles aren't having to compensate so much, they'll stop that particular outward expansion and maybe I'll be able to fit back into my first pair of sevens, since they fit everywhere except for the hips and quads.

So 29 years after learning how to walk, I need to learn how to do it again. Which is kind of amusing in it's own way. Hopefully there will be less falling over this time around.

Today's sing-a-long song: "Walk the line" by Johnny Cash

HRH