 Today’s tip is brought to you by a registered massage therepist, Adrienne Stedford. She runs her practice, Hungry Triathlete, out of Penticton BC and is a therapist for various training camps. If you’re a planning a training trip on the Ironman Canada course – you know who to call.
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Training puts HUGE stress on all of the soft tissues in our bodies. When muscles work hard, they develop microscopic tears which your body has to repair. Massage is great way to aid in repair of muscle tissue- breaking up scar tissue where it has formed and realigning fibers in their most functional directions. There is nothing like going to a well-trained Massage Therapist to find your trouble areas and work them out. Your body can use this type of care after every hard workout, though for most of us time and money limits that luxury. So here is the hard part – inflicting self therapy on your own body.
Continue reading Massage Tip
 Ensuring a proper recovery from your training sessions is potentially the hardest thing to do when working full time. However, if you can find a way to incorporate recovery into your working day you’ll come out all the better for it. If you have to sit, definitely put your heels up on a little box or stool under your desk as much as you can. Have a tennis ball handy so you can roll out the muscles in between emails. Stand up and take mini walk breaks often. You can also do some fairly decent stretch routines while sitting in your desk chair. Getting the hip flexors is easy to do even while talking on the phone or hammering out that spreadsheet. Simply stick one leg out behind the chair and the other out in front, much like a lunge, but still use the chair as a bit of a prop so it’s not a struggle. It may look a little weird to people walking by your desk or office, but such is life.
If you have to stand, be aware of your posture. Engage your core muslces to keep your pelvis neutral. Don’t lean on one leg, have both feet planted properly on the ground. Stand tall, imagine a cord pulling your head towards the ceiling. Definitely keep stretching the muscles from time to time and give your legs a good shake to relieve any tension.
Continue reading Ironman Training Recovery At Work
 One of the best things you can do in the off season (if you haven’t been doing this all year) is to pay attention to your hip flexors and IT bands. Throughout the year we all tend to neglect the side to side motion as we busy ourselves running, riding, and flutter kicking our way through each training session. Doing so can easily bring on the dreaded IT band syndrom or unfortunate knee and back pain related to tight/weak lateral legs muscles and stuck muscle fibres and tendons. A secondary effect of week hip flexors is to have your run form fall apart in the later stages of your race. You may not notice during the race, but if you look at those race pictures from mile 10 and mile 20 where you seem to be about to fall sideways into a heap on the ground, you can bet your stabilizing muscles – hip flexors being one of them – are not helping you look good.
So, stretch em out and keep em strong. There are many different types of strengthening excercises: clamshells, lateral leg raises, side stepping on a crossed-over stretch cord…mix em up a bit to keep things interesting. And guys, suck it up and get on the hip machine or grab the bosu ball like all the ladies. Rolling out the IT band and hip flexors with a foam roller or firm ball is equally important. If you’d care to try the toilet plunger approach and leave a comment we’d love to hear about it. Apparently pulling the IT band outwards with the suction of a plunger is another great method to get things un-stuck. We have yet to try that one.
Continue reading Stretch and strengthen your lateral leg muscles
As much as we’d all like to get a massage from an RMT on a daily basis, it’s obviously not possible. Substituting with your own bout of self massage can really help your recovery and stave off injury. The best type of self massage is a form of acupressure. [...]
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About this site:
These triathlon and endurance sport related tips have been compiled by Heather and Trevor Wurtele over the years of their progression from working age-groupers to full time professional triathletes. Heather is now a 4 time Ironman Champion and top 10 World Championship finisher. Trevor has an Ironman PR of 8:22 and a 2:51 Ironman marathon.
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