I am BROKEN!!! I am pretty much running like quazimodo lurching after Esmerelda at the moment, it is positively embarrassing (and rather ouchy…. And CERTAINLY not conducive to any Hot Bitchy project at present).

Sheepishly, this predicament is most likely a direct cause of Project Hot Bitch and the recent over-enthusiastic pummeling I have been giving my poor body.

Sorry body. There you were, used to your almost daily check-ins with the cast of Eastenders and your entire bowl of spaghetti carbonara for dinner, and along came a pair of trainers, an obscene amount of exercise classes, and life as you know it has changed! No wonder you have bestowed an injury upon yourself. You are trying to get us back into eastenders mode!

Yes, for the past few weeks, my body has extracted it’s child-like tantrum of revenge by stiffening up my stupid ankle and making me a dead ringer for Lurch in the Addams Family. AND IT HURTS.

Last week I thought I should probably do something about it, as my walk was starting to scare small children. I popped up a request on Twitter (which I am admittedly becoming slightly obsessed with), asking for physio recommendations and was put in touch with Joseph at KapaMediCare. A physio appointment with a real life osteopath! I am practically an olympic athlete!

Joseph came to my house last Saturday with a hefty looking bag of kit, including a treatment bed and some machines that looked relatively serious. I was nervous. He tested some movements out on stupid my Lurch-foot, plugged some pulse-y machine onto various muscles and made them twinge, and eventually diagnosed me as having INCREDIBLY tight calf muscles. These in turn are actually impeding the amount of movement I have in my tendons, and affecting my poor hurty foot.

It made sense because after this he gave the bit where the calf muscles slide against one another a REALLY deep massage and it felt like absolute joy. He used a variety of rollers (that I am now using a tennis ball to recreate the feeling of) and then plugged me into a pulsey machine which isolated and stretched the tendon, encouraging blood flow and movement. I felt really weird and I obviously kicked up a fuss but it was such a good feeling afterwards.

I was then bandaged up in kinetic tape (hot pink- healing properties in the colour of it alone) and shown how to stretch properly when warming down. This has probably been the issue- naughty I know but I usually just copy the instructor when warming down, and as an apparently super-flexible human being I actually need to be stretching a lot further for my muscles to feel it.

This hyper bendy person theory was not something I was expecting to hear, as I nearly broke myself in half the previous night trying to show off to polite company and do the splits. I am blaming my lack of splits ability on the bottle of tequila I had drunk previous to attempting such a feat (note to self, nearly 30 now).

However I was delighted to get my foot back on the road to recovery, and also to learn a way to prevent it from happening in the future, by learning a proper stretchy-person-friendly warm down. Thanks Joseph! I was really delighted with the overall first experience of physio, and will never be palmed off with a sigh and a tubigrip from the GP again. Time to look after this Hot Bitch Body properly! (I will also be avoiding doing the splits under the influence of tequila until at least 2015, but that’s a different blog post all together).