Day 1592 - Bad Back

This is a post about when stretching suddenly becomes a bad thing ....

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I had my first training session with our Kinder cheerleaders yesterday afternoon, followed by training with the years 1 and 2 children.  It was so much fun! Such a beautiful bunch of kiddies.  I was telling them how important stretching was and we did the normal warm-up exercises to stretch the legs, arms, wrists and back.  As I was doing some of the leg exercises (you know the ones where you sit on the floor with straight legs in a V sit and attempt to touch the toes of one foot) I felt a twinge up the back of my legs.  Normal ... just challenging my muscles to go the extra mile centimetre millimetre.  Three hours later I start to feel a bit of an issue with my lower back radiating down my left leg.  A pinched nerve perhaps?  Four hours later and that niggling feeling becomes a pain shooting down my sciatic nerve.

Fast forward to this morning and I'm now screaming every time I move.  Getting out of bed was an event not unlike a turtle trying to roll of its back.  The pain in my left leg is more than just "wow my muscles have had a workout" and my lower back and arse (yep, it's even affecting my butt) is a hotspot of spasms right now. I can hardly stand ... or sit ... let alone walk.

The worst  part of all this is I have a wedding to go to on the weekend and I want to wear high heels!

Hmmmm.

I'm seriously getting too old for this shit.

The interesting thing is that I stretch regularly (5 times a week) and I am not getting any looser. I don't now if I should throw in the towel with all this exercise rubbish, or step it up a notch and sign up for pilates or yoga in my quest to become a flexi bendy pretzel. I swear I have the body of a 90 year old ...

Anyone got some advice for the Deep Fried walking wounded? 

Here's an interesting article from the Sunday Mercury about bad backs in archaeological studies (dating way back to the cave man).