Last week I told an (I hope) amusing little story about dancing with my youngest. This week, lets talk about…gardening.
I love my flower gardens, in particular my roses, but they’re a lot of work and that work usually involves a lot of bending and digging. This is generally tough on my back. Like, really tough.
Anyway, last spring I put off prepping my flower garden out of laziness, and the forlorn hope that the ice storm in early April didn’t really kill my white rose and it would bloom again. But mostly laziness. Finally I couldn’t put it off any longer and it was time to get the garden fixed up for summer; prune the roses, replace the dead rose, plant the annuals, weed mulch and water. After that, clean up and off to Mom’s birthday dinner.
At dinner I was chatting with my brother in law, who looked a bit of a wreck. And he was. Turns out he and my sister were also getting some outside stuff done. By dinner time he was, in his own words, “completely trashed.” Funny thing, I wasn’t.
In past years, a day of gardening would have wrecked me. In past years, a day of gardening did wreck me; I’d be stiff and sore, and my back would ache for days. In short, I’d have been in the same boat as my brother in law. Instead, while I could feel where I used muscles, I’m not hurting.
The efforts I put into relearning proper spinal alignment, good posture and healthy movement, along with core training, have paid off in ways far beyond simply providing a better example for my boys, it has reset the calendar on my body. I’m about 10 years older than my BIL and a day of work that wrecked him had almost no effect on me.
