Wednesday 4 January 2012

Another learning - again, the hard way

Virgin Active Bank has a new masseuse since I last had one.  This one is -good-.  I had a deep tissue massage today with her and for the first time, I felt utterly beaten up afterwards.  Thing is, I had a training session with Jez booked for 2 hours later.  Biiiig mistake!

Jez started me off on a cycling intervals, 5 minutes sprint, 2 minutes single leg each side then 2 minutes out of the saddle.  I managed the first sprint and the first single leg, then swapped legs and things started to feel odd.  The power went out of my leg and it got a lot harder very quickly.  I banged through the hill climb drill then back into the sprint again and my legs drained of power even faster.  My heart rate wouldn't go up over 158 - usually I'd be banging around the high 170s to low 180s at this point - and it was clear something was not right.  My legs were burning and lacking in any power and I just couldn't get my heart rate any higher, then suddenly I felt like I was going to throw up.  So we stopped.

Turns out that with a proper deep tissue massage, you can end up shunting a whole bunch of crap out of your muscles and into your blood stream and if you try to push it hard with all of that going 'round before it's processed out properly, stuff Doesn't Work.

So there we are.  From now on, no deep tissue massages within 24 hours  before a training session of any kind.  Ideally I'd have it right after a training session on the day before a rest day, but that may not be do-able as I want Mondays to be my rest day.  We'll see.

1 comment:

  1. I'm amazed you could walk after it, let alone do a session!

    I used to get my DTM done after my midweek long, then do a gentle easy run to get the blood flowing the next day.

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