WOW – it’s such a revelation.  I googled stretching with elastic and it came up with lots of hamstring, adductor, abductor and chest exercises.  I tried them out while watching Britain’s Got Talent tonight and … wooooooooow I feel so looooooooooooooooooose … it’s a weird feeling, the best way I can describe it is a sort of spicy feeling in the stretched muscle.  It feels like someone’s put a mix of cinnamon and cayenne into the muscle, then rubbed it a bit.  If that makes sense.  Anyway, it feels very nice and also very stretchy!

While I was in John Lewis I also noticed that they had small foam rollers (about half the length of the one I usually use).  Since I’m off to Budapest next week I thought I’d grab one of those as well because my usual one is too long to fit into my suitcase and I’d like to take it with me, given how active our holiday’s going to be.  I think I’ll need it!  It came with two twelve minute DVDs so I thought I’d check them out too.

The first one’s meant to be a core strength one, and the second our fave – myofascial release baby!  They’re both presented by a dude called Jimmy da Silva who’s, frankly, the most frighteningly flexible person on earth.  Shauna and Audra, eat your lil hearts out …

The core routine was good but you didn’t really need the foam roller for it – you could have done it perfectly well on the floor.  The foam rolling routine was excellent though – it was a bit different to the P90X2 foam rolling sequence in that it focussed on rolling – that is, instead of rolling until you found a sweet spot, then lingering, this DVD got you moving relatively quickly for a bit and then stopping and settling on the sore points.  Basically, say you were working on your hamstrings, you’d breathe in, then as you breathed out, you’d roll down from the glutes to the knees.  Then as you’d breathe in, you’d roll back up from the knees to the glutes.  Then repeat!  Once you’d done that nine or ten times, then you’d find the sore spots and linger on them.

I have to say that I did really really like this approach because it warmed up the relevant muscles directly before I settled on them.  Obviously in Recovery & Mobility you do warm up but by the time you’ve gotten even as far as the second leg, the rest of you is cold again, so I liked this way of doing it .    Which is good, ’cause I can easily incorporate the little fast bit before doing each area when I do Recovery & Mobility, so I’m so pleased I did decide to check out the DVDs.

xxx