Day 20
Last night I took a Percocet for the first time in a while. Interestingly, I’m experiencing more pain now, but it isn’t at the shoulder. The nerve running down my forearm to my index finger has gotten used to my elbow being bent. Now when I straighten my elbow I’m getting a large amount of stretching-type pain. Hopefully stretching it out will bring it back to normal in a couple of days.
My range of motion has been increasing, not that I’ve really been doing much with it. I’ve been trying to keep the shoulder in a relatively neutral position most of the time when it isn’t in the sling. Still, I’m lifting my hand over my head at times to stretch things out. I’m using pain as my guide, and there isn’t any pain doing that.
On the exercise front, not much has changed. After the exercise bike today, inspired by one of the videos over at Martial Thoughts, I put on ankle weights for my side and arc kicks. I kind of liked that, so I think I’ll continue using the weights. Speaking of those videos, the first one wasn’t particularly well produced, and it drives me nuts when people bounce when stretching, but the kicks were good. Second one was pretty well done. They used different terminology than we do, and a couple of the kicks (such as the front heel kick) aren’t in our repertoire. Third one, well, that’s just nasty, and don’t watch that if you don’t want to see a leg break. And, of course, the fourth one was Bruce Lee, which is always good.
As my shoulder gets less interesting, I’m planning on actually having some martial arts content on this blog, so we’ll see how that goes.
Its gonna take awhile for that arm to not hurt when straightening. You’ll have to walk that fine line between pushing it enough to make improvement without overdoing it and causing real damage.
My shoulder has finally improved enouhg that I was able to do pushups for the first time in over 3 weeks. I never thought I’d miss pushups. How few I could do was pretty sobering. Its like starting all over.
Those kick videos were cool. Thanks for posting that link.
@m.a.l.s. (him) Ah, pushups. Haven’t really been able to do them for 4 1/2 months now. I used to do 40 pushups first thing in the morning just to wake up, but I haven’t done that in a while. I’m sure by the time I restart doing pushups it really will be like starting over, and that’s probably still one or two months away.