For the first two or may be three years I was experimenting a lot with muscle mobilization techniques and exercises. I was looking constantly in the books something new to try, searching youtube and the internet for pictures that illustrate new things. Then investing the maximum time I could into muscle/fascia work.

How big was my time investment?

It was huge. I was spending 1 hour before work and 3-4 afterwards. On the free days/weekends I was working up to 8-12 hours a day.

Is it needed to invest that much time?

No.

For me it was more the desire to see progress and to get healthy as fast as possible. But working that much time at your muscles is counterproductive. Here is why:

• Muscles get tense – if you are not relaxed for all the time the work is pointless.
• Intensity is unsustainable long term – the motivation can suffer long term. But I didn’t understand that I was dealing with a long term process and have to take it in little steps.
• Too much pain – having severely dysfunctional fascias results in extreme pain when working on them. I have never used any medications for the pain during the whole time and all resulted in a bad mood as I honestly suffered.
• Muscles are not ready to release at once – it was a fact I had to learn slowly as I was not ready to believe it. I thought I can force the things and win the battle. No. The better I attuned to my body’s tempo of recovery, the better progress I got.

So what is my wisdom about time management with muscle work?

I generally will support the saying ‘more quality than quantity’ is better. So a quantity of up to 1 hour on work days and up to 2-3 hours at the weekend is reasonable for me. I have been working on my muscles almost every day for more than 4 years and think it is good to work may be just a few minutes a day but every day, here is why…

The quality work with muscles means two conditions are met:

• muscles and the whole body are relaxed
• fascias are ready to release some tension

The body relaxation is very important. I can only recommend to work on muscles after a nap or sleep… or a shower! In my early days I ignored that I’m getting nervous with time and tried to push through it, but it never brought satisfying results (may be as everything in life).

The second point is readiness of the fascias. This means that the standard mobilization techniques can easily release some stiffness, when applied at the places that are ready. The work on ready muscles is very satisfying as I actually could feel the results as the fascias were getting ‘unglued’.

As far as any of both conditions are not met it is time to call it a day and save your precious time for something better…

My story of twisted pelvis problems started at the age of 13 or 14. The future pelvis-related pain was still invisible and what I had to deal with was an innocent toe swelling around the nail of the big finger at my left foot.

However this toe problem had some local pain and I unconsciously developed walking pattern of avoiding my big toe on the right foot. This set me for real problems of my muscle groups throughout my whole body.

Fast forward 15 years later I was already conscious of the consequences and experienced real pain through my whole body such as:

knee and hip-joint problems

back pain

neck pain

head pain

overall muscluar and body discomfort after workouts

I was not able to deny the situation I was in anymore. My whole body was fixated into a skewed pose which made it hard to function normally as a man: to do shopping, go to work, ride my bicycle or have a walk were always related to the pain listed above.

It was the winter of 2015/2016 and I heard for a first time about mobility training. It was God sent information, so I started to gather all the resources I could reach to, buying books and tools to mobilize the malfunctioning muscle groups.

It took me more than 4 years to have a significant progress and see at last a light at the end of the tunnel about a final cure of my problems, at the core of which was seated a twisted pelvis.

The whole process of recovering was by no means linear and included lots of mental aspects as well as physical techniques – both popular and self-discovered ones. I finally decided to start this blog and publish some information about the steps I made along my recovery, hoping that this information might help somebody on his/her own way out of a similar situation.