Hello there!

I can’t believe it’s been a month since my last post…So sorry! My only excuse is that I have been enjoy­ing some lovely vaca­tion time up at the cot­tage and have just quite hon­estly, not been very moti­vated to sit down at my com­puter and write. Both of my kids spent the entire sum­mer away at sleep­over camp, so I’ve really had the good for­tune to decom­press, chill out and just truly enjoy the lazy days of sum­mer. I wasn’t lazy with the work­outs though, as you prob­a­bly guessed. I’ve been doing some great rid­ing, both here in the city and up north at the cot­tage. I also have thank­fully, returned to run­ning (yay!) which has really got me pumped up. It’s been quite awhile since I’ve enjoyed run­ning pain-​free and I must say, it’s been a real treat. I espe­cially love my new Nike Lunar Glide shoes…so light and comfy!

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!

So after deal­ing with many nag­ging injuries and inces­sant mus­cle sore­ness, I decided that I was ready to try any­thing that might bring me some relief. I visit my chi­ro­prac­ter when I feel the need to, but quite hon­estly, he merely treats the symp­toms of my pain vs. truly get­ing to the source. So, one morn­ing last week, dur­ing one of my per­sonal train­ing ses­sions, my client rec­om­mended that I go see a Chi­nese med­ical doc­tor from Shang­hai, who prac­tises the art of shi­atsu and acupunc­ture. She went to him dur­ing her preg­nancy when she was lit­er­ally bent over in excru­ci­at­ing back pain. She said after 30 min­utes, she was once again stand­ing upright and feel­ing like her­self again. How could I not try it out???

Hi there,

Today, after my morn­ing spin class, one of my reg­u­lar spin­ners came to me with a few ques­tions regard­ing tar­get heart rates.

Although she rou­tinely wears a heart rate mon­i­tor, she was still unsure what her max­i­mum heart rate should be. Was the num­ber too high, too low or just right?