Are you injured?
I've been lucky with injuries throughout my athletic career. More than often, my biggest complaint is chronic soreness cured by a few days rest. By the end of the summer I had A LOT of low back pain. I dialed down my training and started stretching like a mad man but but it never got better.
Fast forward to mid-October, after visiting a sports chiropractor I had started to feel better (he told me I needed to stabilize and strengthen my abs--and I agree it was an area I had neglected). I should've knocked on wood after telling my chiro that I felt great. I re-injured myself doing Back Squats and thought my days of heavy lifting were over.
I looked all over the CrossFit message board for people who were dealing with the same issues. It turns out, I was not alone and I found a link to a post from Mark Rippetoe that offered a solution to my problem. I used this protocol and felt better after 10 days and was back in the gym working hard after two weeks (PR'ed Jackie by 44 seconds!) I think my injury was a result of weak abdominals, poor sitting position (have you ever seen the way lifeguards sit in their stands), overstretching, and not enough consistent strength training. I'm working on fixing these things to avoid anymore speed bumps in my training.
How to Improve Your Posture | Mark’s Daily Apple
I love good posture articles; especially ones that fall in line with my school of thought. This article from Mark's Daily Apple suggests that conventional notions regarding what is "good posture" may actually be wrong.
The key to avoiding back pain (and, it turns out, achieving healthy posture) lies in the pelvis. Or, rather, the key lies in the positioning of the pelvis. Popular posture advice tells us to tuck the pelvis, to bring it forward. Tucking the pelvis is conducive to achieving that arched, S-curve back that the experts say is healthy and natural, but it’s actually counterproductive to sustainable, healthy posture. Gokhale blames medical professionals for that one, suggesting that the constancy of seeing patients with poor posture (which is almost everyone in developed nations) has conditioned doctors to consider the average S-curved back as normal and actually ideal. It’s not, though. The ideal posture should be mostly straight (or J-shaped, with the bottom curve of the “J” representing the curve of the anteverted pelvis), and it should be effortless and natural.
Sitting is Unhealthy (and What to Do About It) | Mark’s Daily Apple
I'm always harping about how much damage sitting all day does to ones physique. Mark Sisson over at Mark's Daily Apple agrees.
While there is the occasional IT guy who bikes to work, hits the gym on his lunch break, and gets plenty of exercise when he’s not sitting in front of a computer, one Australian study (PDF) concluded that office workers “who spend high amounts of time sitting at work tend to spend high amounts of time sitting on non work days.” In other words, it may be that sedentary employees really do take their work home with them. That same study also found that those same workers had a flawed perception of their own activity levels.
Read complete article: Sitting is Unhealthy (and What to Do About It) | Mark's Daily Apple.