Don’t Neglect Your Stretching With Peripheral Arterial Disease (PAD)

I awoke in the night, last night, with pain in my right calf. “That’s odd,” I thought. I reached down, to find my right soleus muscle was really tight. “That’s odd,” I thought. “But then, I did change my running style, using that toe thing, and any change takes time. Was it that? I don’t think so, because it feels good, like I’m using my feet to pump blood down through my calves, through my feet, and back to my heart, using muscle pumps and improved venous return.”

By the way, people tend to think the heart is a pump (which is really two pumps) that pushes blood through a bunch of inert pipes. Nothing could be further from the truth. The entire vascular system is one massive pumping machine, driven by muscle action, energy dissipation (loss as heat) and storage (elastic storage and recoil), body movement, and a range of osmotic pressure gradients.

Anyway!

I thought, “I don’t think it’s that.” Then I thought, “Sh*t, I’ve been neglecting my stretching (muscle lengthening),” so I stretched my hamstrings gently, which helped, and decided to fix it in the morning. Sometimes it’s hard to fit everything into a busy, happy life.

ZZZZ zzzz!

In the gym, in the morning, after warming up, I went through my calf relaxing exercises. How? By gently lengthening/stretching my hamstrings and hips. Stretching my calves just makes them tighter. They don’t like that!

Soleus muscle nicely relaxed. Let’s see how relaxed it is after the White Lake Half Ironman, next Saturday, assuming I make the bike cutoff time.

Keep moving,

-kev aka FitOldDog

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