Maeghan Silvera-Brown is a personal trainer who introduced Leanstay residents to something called trigger point therapy.

We are not the world’s greatest athletes at Leanstay. On the contrary, we are all relatively new to a regular workout regime. When I say relatively

new, I mean, speaking for myself, that I have been working out regularly as part of my daily life for about 11 months since coming to live at Leanstay —

 and I’m 54.

On-and-off during other times in my life I exercised — sometimes like a maniac. It wasn’t uncommon for me to spend half a Saturday in the gym doing an hour of step, then an hour of body sculpting followed by an hour of yoga.

I loved it.

But that’s been a while. What I’m talking about today is daily workouts at Leanstay. I take them seriously. I wake up at 5:30 most mornings unless

I’m sick or stupidly turn off my alarm. For the most part, I show up for them.

We have had an array of awesome personal trainers at Leanstay. Then along came Maeghan with trigger point therapy.

We finally got to use the foam rollers that have been lying around the Leanstay gym almost since its inception.

In trigger point therapy, you hold muscle compression in one place on a tiny spot or knot. In addition to the foam roller, you can use a dumbbell,

a wall, your thumb, any hard surface, to put pressure on the muscle.

The more sore the muscle, the better it works, I have found. And what I’ve learned from Maeghan is that they’re all sore, which is perplexing.

How is it that someone working out hard for an hour a day can have such sore muscles? Isn’t the whole point of working out that your muscles get strong and toned and healthy and NOT SORE?

What I learned is that the more you work out, the more your muscles scream out for trigger point therapy — not less. Just one of life’s funny little

ironies I guess.

Maeghan combined trigger point therapy on the foam roller with a workout. I lifted weights as I compressed my screaming adductors.

I alternated between elbow and hand pushups as I compressed my quads.

I sweated more than usual. Trigger point therapy can be an amazing workout.

After you apply compression for a while, the muscle stops hurting.

It’s magic.