Everything in your body really is connected

This post came to me yesterday while I was meditating.

Seriously.

Ok, I don’t really meditate hoping for divine inspiration for blog posts. In between my normal workouts, I do yoga, and sometimes there is a 20-minute group meditation before my yoga class. Yesterday I was sitting in the usual cross-legged position on the floor with the best posture I could muster, and, as usual, I was having trouble focusing. Why? Because no matter how hard I tried to clear my mind, all I could think about was how much my back hurt.

You might be thinking, “Well, what did you do to your back?” The thing is, I didn’t do anything to it.

For pretty much my whole life, I’ve had extraordinarily tight hips and hamstrings. They’re so tight that when I sit up straight on the floor, they actually pull on my back muscles. I can do all sorts of other crazy yoga poses—twisting, binding, standing on my hands—without feeling a thing in my back. But as soon as I sit on the floor with straight posture, I get a nagging pain between my shoulder blades.

When I was in high school (which is getting to be kind of a scary long time ago), I did not have the benefit of all the softball and strength training knowledge I have now. I didn’t work out on my own apart from a little extra pitching practice, because I didn’t think I needed to. And you know what? From the moment I turned 15, my back was always temperamental, usually in the exact same spot that tightens up on me when I sit upright on the floor today. I would massage the area and take extra care stretching before games, and I even underwent extended physical therapy on my back for a while. At the time, no one told me that the reason my back kept bothering me was that the rest of my body was too weak to support it… and all the while I was trying to force it perform a windmill pitching motion!

Now that I know better, I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to prepare your body before expecting it to perform well. Get evaluated by a professional to find out where your personal weaknesses lie. You may think you feel fine while you’re playing, but you won’t know what hidden weaknesses you might have in unexpected places until they cause a chain reaction and it’s too late. Address those weaknesses so you can become stronger and faster and play harder. And stay tuned to Fastpitch Power, because Joe will be putting up wonderful information on this topic regularly.

As always, feel free to post any questions or start a discussion in the comments. We’ll always respond!