Scrumify Your Health: Sprint 4

The one with all the stretching

A couple of years ago I went on a 12 day long hike in the Alps. Ever since I got back, I've had an injury that won't go away. It started in my right shoulder and then moved up into my trapezius muscle and my neck.

Given that old injury and the pulled muscle in my back, I decided that I should focus on reducing my muscle pain and increasing my flexibility for Sprint #4.

The tasks I chose to help me with this included doing stretches every day for general flexibility, doing some stretches specifically in the morning along with a YouTube video that would help me stay on track and would give me a little bit of guidance, and then also getting a new physical therapist who could help me formulate a comprehensive plan to reduce my muscle pain.

The general stretches from YouTube were kind of helpful, but it took me almost the whole week before I was able to see my new physical therapist. In that time, I had to reduce the weight that I was lifting and skip a lot of exercises when I went to the gym. I felt like this was the right thing to do since I wanted to focus on sustainability, and I did not want to make my injury worse - nor did I want to stop going to the gym altogether.

When I finally did get to visit the physical therapist, he gave me some new exercises both for my right shoulder and for my lower back. This wasn't until Thursday, but with only one day to go I found that I actually still met my goal. The exercises for the lower back were a huge help in reducing muscle pain.

Even still, I stayed light on the weights and just worked on increasing the number of reps per set. Once the injury subsided, I could slowly increase the weight again.

During the Sprint, I continued to notice my metrics were indicating that my stress level stayed really high after my workouts, through pretty much the entire day. You may remember I had already tried just working out in the evening, but that only caused high stress through the night and poor sleep.

So I thought to try meditating after my workouts to reduce my stress level. I saw a little success in bringing the stress back down, but it wasn't sustained beyond the time when I was actually meditating.

I started to wonder if this really was something to be worried about or just to keep an eye on. Working out causes you to continue burning calories even after you're done with the workout, so I thought maybe this stress metric is just registering that phenomenon instead of real stress. It was something that I would have to look into more.

I did have one day of obvious real stress when I had some friction with my ex while dropping off things for my daughter at her place. In my Sprint Review I was able to see that stress compounded by giving me a poor night of sleep and a very rough day the next day.

On the bright side, I got confirmation that I was eating better and avoiding saturated fat, and was continuing to lose weight. My BMI even got below 24 for the first time, which put me solidly in a normal or healthy range.

Reflecting during my Retrospective, I recognized that even though I didn't complete the task that was most associated with achieving my Sprint Goal until the second to last day, I still met the goal!

This indicates that even though I'm mostly focusing on habits building, there can sometimes be a single task that has a huge benefit right away. It’s probably going to happen when embarking on the first steps of improvement in a new area, like it was here.

I was happy with how things were going and felt like I didn't need to make any changes to my methods during the Retro. It seemed like everything was going swimmingly. I was already one-third of the way through my experiment, and I couldn't imagine anything going wrong.

How was I to know that in Sprint 5, everything would go wrong?