Michelle had me stand in various poses and carry out gentle movements - turning my head, bending forward and back etc - to figure out what areas needed attention.
With the initial assessments done, Michelle tells me that it appears my pelvis is out of alignment, making one leg appear long than the other and sees my right side of my body compensating for the imbalance. Michelle shows me a photo she took of me standing straight. Or, at least I feel like I'm standing straight when in fact my body appears to be leaning to the left a little and my head angles to compensate.
So what's the cause of the wonky pelvis? It could be that I've injured myself in the past that or simply that I was born that way.
It's not helped by the fact that I'm a desk worker. I'm guilty of hunching forward sometimes and I often find my right shoulder and arm is tense when I'm using the mouse.
Further, the fact that I'm sitting on my ass a lot of the time means the hip flexor muscles, which run up the tops of your thighs, through the pelvis and connect to the lower spine, are shortened.
Michelle explains this could be the reason I suffer from lower back pain sometimes. She sets about doing some release work on those muscles, digging deep into my abdomen to press into the muscles.
She also gives me some exercises to do at my desk hourly. As I'm doing the hip flexor stretch at my desk, reporter Ged Cann is chatting away, his back facing me. Then he turns around and stops mid sentence. I'm crouched, on the ground, at my desk, one leg behind me, the other in front. I'm typing as I'm stretching.
"You know, Dani, you get weirder every day," he says.
"I'm doing my hip flexor stretches!"
"Riiiight ... oookay."
Perhaps it's because the hip flexor stretch came not long after he saw me doing the neck exercise (pulling the neck back to align the ears with the shoulders) to help release the tension in the base of my skull. To be fair, I did look a bit bonkers and the stretch back made me look like I had no neck.
Ged might be right about me getting weirder everyday. There are now voices in my head. Or rather, just one. Lynsey Graham's Scottish brogue is on a loop in my head. "Relax yer shouldahs" ... "Shouldahs doon". She's drilled that into me during personal training sessions with her and during the 'Renew yoga' classes I've been doing which Lynsey takes at Advance (more on those another week). But it's working. I'm remembering to relax my shoulders and check my posture regularly.
Pity there isn't an easy fix for my flat slabs-of-meat feet (though there is a podiatrist at Advance Wellness who I'll be seeing about those tootsies soon!).
Advance Wellness Centre is at 711 Victoria Street. For more information about the services they offer see www.advancephysio.co.nz.
