Injuries from long ago

I suffer from Engineer's Brain (look it up). This means I automatically analyze everything in great detail -- picture the Terminator in the original movie figuring out how to drive a truck. This helped greatly in my career as a software engineer, but it's not something that gets turned on and off. This accounts for my (muffled) snarky response when my ballet instructors tell the class, "That was really good" -- I've already identified a half dozen things I've done wrong, and don't get me started on what I saw others doing.

It also applies to my physical therapy. In addition to pummeling my legs with my massage gun, my PT gave me an exercise to strengthen my tibialis posterior muscle. This exercise involves standing with my feet in parallel with a ball between my ankles, slowly rising to demi-pointe and lowering back down, all while squeezing the ball.

Here's a video on Youtube demonstrating this exercise. This is not me; it's merely a video I found that demonstrates the exercise clearly and concisely.

My PT had me do this exercise with my fingertips touching the wall for balance, though a ballet barre also works just fine. This is also the exercise where he pointed out that I'm arching my back to move my hips forward, rather than just shifting my entire body forward slightly.

While researching this exercise online (remember, Engineer Brain), Google started showing me exercises for shin splints. Intrigued, I looked deeper to see what the connection is. Apparently shin splints are also caused by overuse injuries to a combination of tibialis anterior and tibialis posterior. This caused me to flash back to my sophomore year of high school, when I was member of the indoor track team. We practiced on the second floor of the school, where the hallway formed a large square. Running on concrete gave me (and most of the rest of the team) really bad shin splints in both legs. I wonder whether this might help explain why these muscles are so tight 40-some years later.

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My first ballet class after my Friday PT session was the following Wednesday. Although my PT gave me the OK to go to class, I thought it would be smart to minimize the things that might aggravate this problem (pain avoidance!). For example, instead of doing the jump preparations in centre with the rest of the class, I stood at the barre at the back of the room and did the heel raise exercise. (After class, my instructor said she thought this was a really good exercise for this problem).

My first attempts at a pirouette on my left foot were failures. There's nothing more effective at telling me that I'm allowing my foot to roll out than a sharp pain in my heel. My first thought was that I might have to skip the rest of class, but then I tried one while really focusing on the position of that foot. Not only did it result in a pain-free turn, it was a cleaner turn than many I've done recently. Splitting my attention isn't good for my execution of the rest of the steps in the exercise, but that's a trade I'm willing to make in the short term.

I still haven't figured out how to do a pain-free glissade to the right, though. I'm guessing that I'm doing the glissade wrong, which wouldn't surprise me in the least. I'm intending to bring this up with my PT during our next session. I'm really glad I won't have to explain ballet terminology to him!