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Thursday, January 31, 2013

Looking at Increases in Strength a bit Differently

The past few months, since kick starting my journey to be awesome at CP, I have been able to work around my "injuries" and have been able to get a training effect.

With all of the issues I have dealt with, torn left labrum, chronic left big toe pain, severe left anterior hip tightness, occasional  right anterior knee pain, right jammed ankle, one would think that I would be relegated to only training my right arm. However not the case. Working with all the coaches at CP I was able to find exercises that I could do without pain. If I did them correctly. When talking with Eric about it he did tell me that a positive of my shoulder pain was that if it hurt during specific movements, I was doing it wrong. Honestly, I had never thought of it that way before.

That one statement made me actually think about what I was doing in the weight room, and probably overthink, to make sure that I would relearn movement patterns correctly.

Doing this was and still is a humbling experience. For most upper body exercises I had to crank down the weight to relearn the patterns. I had to took my ego out of lifting. It helped. Slowly and steadily over the past 5 months I have been working on getting my movement patterns back and increasing my strength. I have gotten back to a solid weight of 193lbs and increased my lean tissue that I lost over the summer.

However, by the looks of my numbers on my logs you wouldn't really say my strength has been increasing, even though they have. Given the state that I have been in I have to judge my increases in strength a tad differently. Because of the shoulder pain all vertical pressing or rowing has been taken out (on my left side). Leaving me to rely on horizontal rowing variations, bilateral and unilateral, and mostly pushup variations.

In the past 2 months I have been able to go up 5 pounds in a standing 1 arm cable row on my left side. That is pretty weak for a baby boomer let alone a 23 year old fitness professional, but the quality of the repetitions  I have been able to do have increased dramatically. My rowing pattern has started to get synced up so that scapular retraction will initiate the movement allowing me to use my lower trapezius to stabilize my shoulders and letting me keep my core tight throughout the movement. So even though my traditional number of how much weight I can do is still very low, I know that my strength and coordination is increasing because my pain levels have decreased and the quality has increased.

Think about assessing the quality of the exercise next time you are in the weight room and you have gone up in weight, not just making sure you have good form, but actually getting a sense of what your body is doing during the movement. You will see that the high number isn't everything.

Take the ego out of it.
Do it well, then do it heavy.