Retooling Part 1

So, it has been a couple of months since I began the retooling process. To help others understand where I am coming from I am offering a little more background on myself. I have an extensive experience in weight lifting and endurance sport. I was a submariner, diver and rescue swimmer in the Navy. I have unofficial life time personal records of 365lb bench, 500lb squat, 500lb dead lift, 10k run under 45 minutes. I have spent considerable amount of time hiking mountains for back country snowboarding. This is all before I started CrossFitting. This history makes it hard to go back to square one and start over again, but it needed to be done.

Back to retooling. During the CF open I was having consistent left shoulder pain any time I did any pulling motion. This eventually progressed down to the inside of my elbow and began to bother me during front squats and push presses. I could do most any WOD, but it came at a cost of the initial bite of pain and then the lingering pain that never really went away. After video analysis of myself, I could cleary see how the left scapula was not stabilizing well. This was transmitting forces down into my left elbow creating a new problem.

I finally reached a point where I had to do all the things that I tell my patients to do, but was too bull headed to do myself. I took a week off of any upper body pushing or pulling and then began doing basic scapula and core stabilization along with spinal lengthening exercises. I did this for about one week. The goal is to get the muscles to fire so that you can get as much surface area of the scapula against the rib cage as possible. Then once this was accomplished I began progressing to basic pushing and pulling with very light weights. Any pain, besides muscle burn, was a signal to modify the movement. To allow the motion to occur correctly, you must have a elongated stable spine while maintaining as much surface area between the rib cage and scapula as possible, while at the same time pushing and pulling. For anyone with pain resulting from dysfunction (almost everyone with pain has some dysfunction) this is harder then you might imagine. Easy to “do” at home, but once someone who is trained to spot these dysfunctions is watching, it gets much more challenging AND beneficial.

Next up, more advanced pushing and pulling.