I woke up this morning and the mobility in my ankle has significantly increased. The swelling is also noticeably less even after the morning workout and rehab program. So, as with all the rehabilitative techniques that I personally like and find effective, there can be some "discomfort associated with the procedure" and I gotta say that the immediate improvement I'm finding after performing "joint mobs" is well worth it.

Sounds pretty cool, right? Let’s see what it really means:

“I need you to drape your foot over the arm of the chair, about mid-calf, so I can easily access your ankle”.

Kimmy repositions the chair so this it’s sideways to me and then adjusts another chair so she can sit close to my foot.

“Is this okay?” I ask.

“Yup”.

She then puts one hand on the bottom of my foot, near my achilles tendon, the other hand on the top, near my toes, and proceeds to push and pull really, really, hard. After several minutes of, nausea inducing, pushes, pulls, and kneading, she eases up puts my foot down, gets up from her chair and walks to the change-room. I’m thinking to myself, that was f$%#ing fun! After a couple of seconds of sitting in the chair with my eyes squeezed shut, trying to hold back the tears, I look and Kimmy’s sitting on the chair and putting some moisturizer on the my foot. Now this is more like it!

“We need to do some cross-friction massage”

I’m thinking massage, all right. Diggetty diggety diggety....And then rahhhhh!, she grabs my foot and starts grinding all the sore swollen parts with a grip of steel, paying particularly close attention to the tight, painful, scar tissue.

This was my introduction to the second phase of my ankle rehabilitation. When I picture a young woman rubbing my foot, (Jo, baby, I don’t really ever picture this) this was definitely not it.

Kimmy and I were at the Canadian Bodybuilding championships this last weekend and I was talking to a few people about it and got asked the the following statement / pseudo question “but those are the guys that take steroids...” A couple of people said this to me so I thought that maybe more might be asking the same thing.

Now I know it seems you can’t read the sports section without reading about an athlete “coming clean” and admitting they’ve used some sort of pharmaceutical aid to enhance their performance. Even better, if they haven’t admitted usage, we question their integrity and challenge what we see as superhuman performance. Excellent examples are, A-Rod admitting he didn’t think they were tic-tacs and the ridiculousness of Lance Armstrong’s “B” test coming in positive.

But in Bodybuilding the debate is much, much simpler, you have tested and non-tested shows and this weekend Kimmy and I went to a non-tested show - The CBBF Canadian Bodybuilding Championships. It was sooo cool. And it clearly is what it is. The thing about steroids is that I’ve never understood how people think that if you take a pill or an injection it’s going to turn you into Lance or Alex and make you a world class athlete.

I compete in the “tested” shows and I’ve got the inside on the discipline and dedication that goes into competing in bodybuilding and I can tell you it’s a pretty tough gig to compete in a local bodybuilding show let alone a pro-qualifier like the one that were at this last weekend. The men and the women at the show were awesome with absolutely inspiring shape and conditioning. Nearly every athlete I saw perform was lean and rock hard, almost as if they were carved from granite. These are qualities of physique training that have a lot more to do with the hard work, discipline, and dedication of the athlete than they do the specific cycle of drugs they take. You don’t buy a ultra light racing bike, take some EPO and then go and win the tour de France and you don’t take some fat burners and little “juice” and win your IFBB pro-card.