Getting Fit: Kick-Starting Your Health From Zero
Or why babies crawl before they walk
And before that, they roll over and push themselves up.
Believe it or not, I used to be strong. Well, not that strong. I could compare myself to a regular person, and had visible muscle definition, which was nice.
Then I got pregnant.
Broken baby incubator
I am very aware that I have been lucky. Some people with hypermobility actually break down. So do some without it. I know a young woman with osteoporosis caused by pregnancy. Multiple breaks for no reason? Count me out, is what I would have expected women to say millennia ago. But they didn’t, so here we are.
I didn’t exactly break down. I merely began deteriorating more rapidly.
Baby will take what it needs but i assumed they needed walking much later in life. By the middle of the pregnancy, I was lucky if I could get down the stairs in the morning without stopping fifteen times for the thirteen steps, and having to rest for two hours afterward.
It was bad. I had terrible pelvic instability, which got better but never quite went away. I dreaded attempting to get out of bed because I couldn’t know what part of my body wouldn’t work that day.
I did well mentally. I had a good therapist with whom I talked weekly. I had a secret weapon, too. I was writing a book. That kept me going, even if I only put pen to paper (literally) for ten minutes a day. Some days, my thumbs, and hands, and arms, and back wouldn’t allow anything more. But that worked and kept me sane for the whole nine months, a little less than six of which I spent at home, alone, during the height of covid.
But let’s face it, I never was that social, to begin with.
Labor and delivery
Labor and delivery went normally. I had a gynecologist who ignored anything and everything to do with my condition. When I shared the fact that I was hypermobile and was afraid I might pop out a hip during delivery, she only told me she never heard of doing a cesarean for that. I was in no way asking for a cesarean. In fact, if I could avoid getting one in my lifetime, I’d be happier than any clam.
I wanted it to be written in my dossier so that the midwives would know how to deal with my legs and ribs during labor.
For those who don’t know, it is not uncommon for midwives to push — hard — on the stomach of the person in labor to “nudge” the little one out. My son needed such a nudge, and he needed it badly, as he kept creeping up under my stomach during delivery. Fun times.
I was lucky there, too. My significant other was allowed to hold my weaker leg, which meant it was safe from popping. And the midwives on shift that night were understanding, listened to my concerns — mostly expressed by my significant other, as I had other things to do — and did not break any ribs.
Aftermath
Once the little man was out, things were supposed to be fine and dandy. You know, the six weeks thing. After six weeks you can get back to your usual routine. You can train (with some exceptions, like sit-ups) as usual¹, care for your baby, and if you’re unlucky, go back to work. And don’t forget the so-awaited lovemaking.
In reality, the six-week period is a myth. It is what your doctor might tell you if everything went according to plan. However, it might turn out it’s not how it is for you. This is essential. Whatever you do, whether you have recently been pregnant or are starting a new exercise routine: listen to your body. I’m sure you read this before. I’m sure everyone has been telling you this. I also know you will not do it the first time around. I didn’t.
One step forward, two new symptoms to deal with
Once I felt I was getting back to a semblance of normal, whatever that might mean, I decided it was time to go back to training as normal. In my case, that meant lifting weights up to 25kg over my head (for lack of more weights), for about an hour, three times a week.
Needless to say, it didn’t go like that. At all.
I began lifting weights (while following all the advice of my doctors and of the Internet for safe training after pregnancy). Immediately, my body screamed, and it screamed loudly.
The most notable symptom of overtraining, which I didn’t recognize at first, was my muscles spasming for days after training. Completely unlike delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS), of which you’ve undoubtedly heard, and which you even more undoubtedly experienced at some point in your life. That’s a nice kind of pain. This was something else. My muscles refused to rest in any shape or form but just kept spasming.
I drank more water. Protein shakes. I rested longer between training sessions. So long, in fact, that they didn’t appear to be forming any kind of training regimen anymore.
Nothing helped.
Finally, I gave up and found myself a hypermobility-knowledgeable physical therapist, and asked them what to do.
A new beginning, or why babies crawl before they walk, sit before they crawl, and push themselves up before they sit
My physical therapist didn’t laugh at my attempts, and I love her for that. She did, however, make me dial things back so much that it felt like I wasn’t doing any kind of training at all.
She started me on the Muldowney protocol, which is a training regimen for strengthening the stabilizing muscles in the body. It could benefit anyone but is essential for those of us with wobbly bodies.
It also begins with the kind of exercises which don’t feel like an exercise at all. It just looked, and in the beginning even felt like doing nothing at all on a yoga mat, until weeks later when you feel the difference.
And that was that. I was back on track to building my body the way it used to be, or maybe even stronger.
It was, and still is, painstakingly slow progress. Some exercises look like I’m laying on the mat and doing literally nothing. But the muscles are going. My core is getting stronger. I have a real muscle definition on my abdominals. No six-pack. I am not going for that anyway. But I look stronger.
And most importantly: I can walk now. A walk in the park — a kilometer or two — doesn’t make me have to lie down for hours. I can pick up my son, and we can play for hours without me breaking down halfway through.
I still get tired, a lot. I also have setbacks. The first ones were terrible for my mental health.
Setbacks, and how to deal with yourself
The first setback I got had to do with one muscle that kept hurting, and hurting a lot. I didn’t know what was the problem, and I couldn’t go back to PT at the time. I kept pushing through the pain, then had to move training for days until it got better.
Finally, I scheduled an online appointment with my PT and told her about it over Teams. She nodded while I was speaking, then said: “You must dial back to the very beginning, and build from there”. I was shocked. I couldn’t go back to doing… nothing, as it seemed, could I? But at this point nothing I had tried worked, and I was in constant pain. So I listened, against everything my mind was telling me.
And it worked, again. My PT hadn’t said anything new. In fact, she made me do exactly what she had made me do the first time, only now I felt I had built so much and had to throw it away and start anew.
She was right, of course. As I began doing the exercises from absolute zero once more, I realized I wasn’t triggering that specific muscle correctly. It didn’t work together with the rest, and kept being stretched while it was supposed to be shortened. Once I adjusted my technique (something which my PT couldn’t have seen I was doing wrong; only I could feel it), things went back to normal. I progressed steadily back to where I had gotten before, but this time without pain.
What did I learn
My conclusion after a year and a half of trial and error is simple: if I was serious about training, I had to swallow my pride and start from the beginning. The moment I realize something is wrong, I must dial back to the time before it went wrong, and look closely at what I was doing to pinpoint the problem. Crying about lost gains is pointless if you hit a plateau that is rooted in the wrong technique. Those aren’t real gains, or more specifically, they are the wrong ones. More so because such “wrongly” strengthened muscles can and will create disbalances in the body which might hurt the whole chain from head to toe.
There’s a life lesson somewhere in there. If something feels wrong, go back and see when it started feeling wrong. Then choose another path. I know it’s good writing advice, so why not use it in other parts of life, too?
[1] Please, listen to your doctor about this one. Doctors were trained to put us back together when broken, so they should know what a broken body (because that’s what pregnancy and delivery do) can and cannot do. Also, the six-week thing doesn’t seem to apply to cesarean in the first place.
