Hi there,

I promised I’d share my amaz­ing results from my shi­atsu mas­sage and high — dose cal­cium sup­ple­men­ta­tion. As I had told you last week, I began a daily cal­cium sup­ple­men­ta­tion rou­tine after vis­it­ing a shiatsu/​medical doc­tor a few weeks ago. I’ve been tak­ing 2500 mg of cal­cium cit­rate per day and have never felt bet­ter, espe­cially in the morn­ing, when my lower back is very tight.

The true test came when I headed out for a ride on Sun­day morn­ing. Typ­i­cally, after about an hour on the bike, the lower left side of my back starts to really ache, forc­ing me to get off the bike and stretch. This time though, I rode for ²¹⁄₂ hours straight, vir­tu­ally pain free. The ride involved a good amount of climb­ing which can gen­er­ally cause my back grief, but incred­i­bly, it felt great!

Now I must add that I also adjusted my seat posi­tion­ing /​pos­ture on the bike which I’m sure also con­tributed to my back pain relief.

If any of you have been suf­fer­ing on the bike due to back pain, you might be inter­ested in this link. Good info!

http://​www​.youtube​.com/​w​a​t​c​h​?​v​=​3​7​S​r​q​V​R​3​7​Y​s

So, the back’s feel­ing bet­ter but I’m still not run­ning due to my damned inflamed ten­don in my foot. I did some read­ing and am now think­ing that per­haps my feet have relied too heav­ily on a very sup­port­ive, stiff run­ning shoe. So, that being said, I went out and pur­chased a pair of Mer­rel bare­foot shoes which I have been wear­ing reli­giously. I taught a few core/​stability and mus­cle classes in them but decided against wear­ing them in my boot­camp class, for fear of shin splints.…I’m not sure I’ll ever be ready to run in them but the plan is to even­tu­ally move to a more minimalistic-​style, lighter run­ning shoe. I’m just hop­ing that the mus­cles in my feet will soon be as strong as the rest of my body and I can hit the pave­ment once again!

Have a great night!