Active Recovery

A new year means I finally remember to post on this thing. Long story short, last year started out unbelievably crappy but turned out to be somewhat alright. I also hit my goal weight of 225 pounds. Among other things, my shoulder is fixed though I have made it musclebound and limited its range of motion in an attempt to get the damned thing to hold together. Now that it's been solid for about four months it's time to work on loosening it up a bit so I can finally do dips, pullups, and climb again.

With that said, after a lot of research I am going to basically lift like a bodybuilder the next couple months. I will be doing one body part a day and will be doing 30-45 minutes of cardio 3 times a week. This will give my shoulder a much needed break and the cardio will hopefully keep me from gaining a ton of weight. I started last night on the bike and then did a good solid hour of legs. It is weird to only have one body part that is feeling it after a workout.

Let's see how this goes.

Great song

Junior Senior along with the girls of The B52s singing Take My Time. The video is pure 80s style cheese but the song is quite excellent.

Reveal

I finally got around to having a talk with my old personal trainer manager from Lifestyle Family Fitness regarding my desire to become a part time personal trainer. Now with Lifestyle Family Fitness gone, you may say that I am at least four months behind on this talk. But since we are both Life Time employees, albeit at different locations, I felt it pertinent to discuss personal training as an option.

I may have mentioned it before, but my entire reason for going to Lifestyle Family Fitness was to become a trainer, work weekends, and bring fitness to a wide variety of people's lives. Thing is, I discussed that with exactly one person: the personal trainer area manager. And shortly after we discussed it, he got demoted. So I dropped the subject knowing he was not going to be in the state of mind to properly help me get where I wanted to be. Then I got laid off from the school and I decided to just go for it. And then my personal trainer manager took a job out of state. With a new manager, I waited for my time. And then I came up for operations supervisor. Then the company closed and we all got folded into a different, much larger, much more successful company.

I don't know if it was just the time to do so, but I felt I needed to get this reveal off my chest, that somehow I can stop carrying some crazy idea I had running around my head. They don't need part time trainers at his location and I am perfectly fine with that.

Great song

The song. Awesome. The video. Cool and kind of cheesy. Love it.

Team sports

Something I will truly never understand is peoples' fascination with team sports. Name dropping catchy sounding athlete name over and over, game points, ego attachment, all of it is something completely out of my realm of understanding. Obviously I get the working out part, but to workout with the express purpose of competing against another team? Whatever, my friends. You go and have fun with that.

In middle school, I was courted to be on the basketball team due entirely to my height. I am a very tall man and have always been that way. We had an even taller basketball coach who hounded me day in and day out to be on his team. I did not in any way show that I had even the slightest bit of athleticism in me, but that did not matter. They claimed they could bring it out of me and I would be a basketball star and would therefore be accepted by my peers. They touted I would also have a place to belong, that I could have a body I would be proud of. You name my psychological drawbacks, they exploited them.

And yet in the face of all that, I turned it down. I honestly had no desire to be a part of a team. That acceptance would be as fleeting as winning or losing a game. I knew even then there's not a snowball's chance in hell I would be proud of my own body. And I would feel a chance of belonging one day but I will have no idea when, where, or with whom.

Everybody who tried so hard to make me want to be a part of the team suddenly and unsurprisingly turned against me. Nobody could understand that I simply had no desire to play basketball. I somehow became even more of an outcast than I was before. I knew I made the right decision and that's all that mattered. I do not believe in doing something that brings you no joy. I would have had to put a lot of time into something I couldn't even begin to care about and I didn't see that as a positive way to live my life. But to see those people who tried so hard to sell me on playing basketball suddenly turn around and call me a jerk for wasting their time and a loser for not wanting to be an athlete was very jarring and hurtful.

Even years later, I can't begin to play basketball. I hold the ball and all those scars get ripped open.  I have muscles now but I am not proud of my body. I can't take my shirt off around people. And who the hell knows if I will ever belong anywhere.

What a way to take something that, at most, could have been a passing interest and turn it into something I shall never care for. As for the other team sports, they are all fundamentally the same to me. You take a ball and put it through something for points. One team tries to get ball through goal and one team tries to stop team from getting ball through goal. Oh, how very interesting.

Actually

Turns out my shoulder injury is not a shoulder injury at all. It is a pinched nerve in my neck. I have been seeing a chiropractor for a couple months now and I can't believe how much of a difference it has made. In addition to spinal and shoulder adjustments, I had SASTMs done to my injured shoulder. A SASTM is where they take a purple scraper and scrape out the scar tissue and deposits and what not in your muscles. It's pretty damn deep and painful and if there is scar tissue the area bruises quite badly. The front side of my rotator cuff and the cap of my injured shoulder bruised so bad and was so tender for a few days after that I had to go up a couple shirt sizes in order to not feel chafing. The trap and lat were bad too but nothing like the rotator area. My shoulder is largely healed up and I didn't have to have surgery. I'm very impressed with how this has gone so far. At this point both clavicles need to be adjusted a couple times a week. The doctor swears I must have been dealing with this problem for a long time since it's a constant thing which would kind of make sense. Especially when I first started lifting, I had a wildly shifting bout of strength. One day I could bench 95 pounds and the very next session I could only bench around 65 pounds. I just wondered if it was all in my discovery to understand my own strength and body but that might not be the entire story after all.

With that said, I'm starting to build up again, and that's a great feeling.

Great song

I watched the video on Beavis and Butt-head and while the video is a pure pile of ass, I must admit the song is really good. With no further ado, I present Kids by MGMT.