For this scorecard I mainly wanted to talk about the back pain issues because I feel like I have made some improvements. To start I have been exploring yoga for any poses that might help open up my hips and hit my mid-back. Things I added to my scorecard to help my back pain:

• Downward dog – didn’t feel them very well
• Reverse planks – forgot to do them most days
• Hot pack – loved using hot packs
• Ice pack – loved using cold packs as well
• Stretch & roll out – Helped a ton, and I found some nice stretches 

Highest Yield:

The most helpful were the ice pack and hot pack. They both helped with alleviating the pain so much that after using them, I always had an easier time getting up going about my day.  

Yoga poses:

I added downward dog thinking that would help open up my hips but I had a difficult time feeling any stretch while I was in position. I very easily could’ve been doing it wrong. Even pigeon pose didn’t seem to open up my back the right way. I found camel pose and child’s pose(working side to side, not straight on), and these have become my new favorites. The camel pose opens up my mid-back while child’s pose opens up my lats all the way down to the hips. I have also added a really nice basic T-spine mobility exercise. I don’t know what to call it, but if you google “T-spine mobility exercise” it’ll probably be the first one that comes up. It is an all fours position, except one hand is on your head and you rotate your torso as much as possible. It might be an understatement to say that I have very poor external rotation in this movement.

Foam roller/Lacrosse ball rolling:

I would also roll out my lats which always helps, and I use a lacrosse ball to roll my mid-back against the wall and these are great.  Also, something that I have started to do again is use a lacrosse ball to roll out my IT band against the wall which hurts, but it makes me feel like I have new legs after doing them.

Static Holds:

I didn’t do the reverse planks enough to notice if they helped.  I always forgot about them but I am making them an emphasis in the next scorecard.  I will also try to add supermans along with focusing on reverse planks 

Weights:

The gym-focused exercises that I have been adding are focused more on glute development. I know it might look weird being a guy and going and doing all the hip development exercises but I think activating the glutes help with back pain.  I think that when you do these exercises you will cause the glutes to carry more weight than they otherwise would have.  So after hitting the glutes for a few days now, and my runs feel better, my back feels better, and I feel like I have better posture.

• Standing cable pull throughs – they look weird, but they help me “activate.”
• Seated good mornings – stole this from Kneesovertoesguy – this exercise seems to help open up my low back. I kind of get the idea that it’s activating something that helps alleviate the strain on the low back.
• Hip abductors – again, like the cable pull throughs, just do them for the activation 

I’ll admit I have always thought of glute development as a vain pursuit with the exclusive purpose of developing “show muscles,” until now. A few years ago I read an article about increasing your ground impact force to improve your running speed, and one of the ways of doing this was improving glute strength via heavy squats and heavy deadlifts. That was in the back of my mind until I watched Ryan Hall on The Drive podcast hosted by Dr. Peter Attia. In this interview, they discussed the benefits of being able to increase the ground impact force to improve running speed which can be facilitated by hex bar deadlifts and glute development. They discussed the improvement of the hex bar deadlift to bodyweight ratio of around 3 was associated with much improved running time. So I’ll start sprinkling deadlifts into workouts in the future. 

A thought I had about my nutrition was that my diet needs to change with the workout that I have planned. On days that I am running I need the carbs and the fats, but on my pure lifting days I don’t need as many carbs, and definitely not as many fats.

Greek yogurt has made itself a staple in my diet now.  I need to really figure out a better way to get spinach in my diet, I am still pretty bad at getting that in. I don’t know why I included turmeric and flaxseed, I’m pretty sure on the last scorecard I said I wasn’t going to keep them on.

Again, I missed on the blood pressure measurements.  I took them a few times and I felt like they were too high, and so I stopped taking them because I feel like I need a new bp pump. I guess this is something anyone would think if they got too high of a bp reading, but still, I am going to pick up a new one. 

So taking everything into account I think I have taken a step in the right direction in reducing my back pain, but I do need a better routine to help me make sure I get everything done.