So I had a little bit of a set-back this week.
When I went to the gym on Monday, I did a full arm strength-training set and about 30 mins of cardio. It wasn't much compared to what I've done before, and only one move was new but somewhere, something I did must've been too much for my neck (see previous post about vertigo and PT).
I woke up in the wee hours of the morning on Tuesday feeling like the back of my head was in a vise. Serious pain. Fortunately it didn't set off a major vertigo attack like it could have, just some mild head spins here and there. But my PT had shown me an app with a diagram of all the nerves, muscles, tendons, and ligaments that I've been having problems with and boy, if you'd colored all of that a really bright, angry, pulsing red, you'd have a visual depiction of what I was feeling. I ended up having to take Tuesday off from work because even after it had largely settled down by late morning, just sitting at the computer made it all start spasming again. I spent lots of cozy time with my neck heating pad and popping Excedrin.
I already had an appointment with my PT set up for Wednesday morning so we talked through what had happened and my neck was clearly still super-reactive, so at his advice I was fairly careful of what I was doing the rest of the week to avoid having a relapse. That being said, in response to needing to avoid upper body stuff, my personal trainer had me do leg stuff--serious leg stuff!--Thursday. I'm going to hurt tomorrow. It's always worse the second day. Epsom salts in my future, I think.
I used my Tai Chi Temple app on Tuesday. I didn't want to do anything that strained my neck so no gym, but the Tai Chi/Qi Gong moves helped me feel like I wasn't being a slug and gave me a nice stretch. That felt great. I highly recommend this app. You have to work your way through the training but you're still getting the benefits even in the training portion. So yay.
Sad trombone, though: I found out Thursday my much-loved personal trainer is going back to school in January (for physical therapy, so I have to applaud that), which necessitates her moving out of town. I knew when I signed up with a 23-year-old trainer it was likely going to be somewhat short term...I'd just hoped for a longer short-term. A few more appointments with her and then I'll just keep my fingers crossed that I enjoy my next trainer as much!
Oh, and hey--here's another benefit to focusing on being more active and such: my resting heart rate has dropped about 15 BPM since last spring! Woot! I'm now "very good" for women my age. It's nice to compare positively for anything these days!