Day 11 of 185
This week has been a little disappointing with my 6 months of stubbornness challenge. I’ve stuck to my calorie goals every single day and I was losing weight.
I’ve been trying out a beginner programme for doing dips. The first phase of it is doing ‘negatives’ from a stand. So I start at the top of the movement by stepping off a stand and I lower myself down back on to the stool.
There’s a fairly common belief that dips are bad for the rotator cuff muscles and tendons especially if you’re trying to dip with too much weight.
During my Friday gym session my left shoulder and upper arm felt strained during dips. I “pushed through” the strain and completed the sets, stretched and went home.
Throughout the weekend my should felt a little tight and hurt a little when I reach my arm around my back. I thought nothing of it, just a little DOMS, no?
On Monday’s gym session I did my usual squats. My shoulder started to ache. I could tell something was up. I moved on to my warm ups for the bench press. I started with an empty barbell and my shoulder still felt strained. I added 20kg to the bar and tried my next warm up set. NOPE! The shoulder hurt more and I was done. I cut the session short right there.
While it is mostly a leg exercise the squat requires you to hold the barbell on your back by reaching your arms back. This position would have been aggravating the injury in my shoulder. By the time I was bench pressing my shoulder had already been stressed enough.
On Wednesday I went back to the gym hoping the shoulder had healed somewhat. I got through my squats (100kg yay!) and moved on to overhead press. Now the OHP is a shoulder exercise so I knew that if my shoulder played up at all then I needed to stop immediately. I decided not to go for 50kg and just try 40kg to give my body a break. I stopped mid way through my third set. Lifting the barbell was easy but bringing it down brought a nice, sharp pain in the shoulder, right at the bottom of the movement. Again, I went home barely having done any of my workout.
I decided on no gym until Monday when I’ll reassess whether my shoulder is still sore. If it’s still sore on Monday I’ll have to see a physiotherapist (sigh). I really want to avoid a shoulder injury. I tore my right calf muscle a few years ago because I pushed through pain (no pain, no gain, right?). That was just a calf muscle. A shoulder injury is a lot more expensive and you tend to not recover from them.
On Thursday I went for a run and that calf muscle was sore as hell. I had to limp around the house afterwards. It had not been that bad since it healed from the tear. I might have to take a break from all exercise for a few days, possibly even a week!
I know all is not lost. I just need to pay very close attention right now. I am just worried that this loss of momentum so early on my challenge is going to derail me fully. I have to double down on my nutrition as I won’t have higher intensity exercise to stoke my metabolism. The Red Rock Noodles I had on Wednesday messed with my weight a little. It was within my calorie budget for the day but it was a whopping 900+ calories! It must have had a lot of sodium too. My weight jumped to 102.7kg the next morning (from 101.8kg the previous day)
This morning my weight was at 102.4kg so it’s going down again. My irrational side is starting to kick in. It’s saying that I’m wasting my time and that all this strictness is limiting my enjoyment of life. The rational part of me, though, is still saying that the strictness is what’s needed for the rest of my life because the food that we have is just too calorie dense for our bodies.
