Aging and Fitness Failures

This is just a minor note on what I’m dealing with. Maybe there’s a lesson in here for you or someone you know.

My right shoulder has bothered me my whole life. As a kid, I often wondered why it hurt to throw balls the way other kids did. As an adult, I really took to weight lifting as a form of exercise, and by age forty that right shoulder started hurting in a particular way during any variation on the bench press. I blew it off as training pain, pushing too hard with high weights. But not long ago I realized it was visually not the same as the left shoulder; it’s not shaped normally and the whole right side of my shoulder girdle is misaligned.

So sometime around age fifty it suddenly got stiff and sore. It hurt to reach in some directions. After awhile it settled down and simply began making noise. I quickly learned that the only way I could continue the same workouts was to pull my elbows in close to my body to avoid the most painful angle. When the left should repeated that cycle recently, I figured it was just a matter of aging. It, too, eventually approached somewhat normal activity and I returned to the elbows-in push-ups and so forth. Until yesterday.

During a high-pressure exercise, pressing my own body weight on a declined surface, the right shoulder crackled audibly and began to hurt. So I stopped. It had been a little stiff over the past few days, but now it hurts to raise my arm in any direction. It’s obviously an issue with the tendons. Avoiding any resistance work that resembles a push-up or bench-press will probably see it calm down, but at this point I’m pretty sure I won’t be doing that kind of exercise ever again. I may be able to return to the tension exercises, but actual resistance is likely now a permanent no-no.

So I’ll continue the hard workout in the park without any kind of push-ups. I can still do bar-dips, and I imagine when it calms down I can do overhead pressing with the bungee cord. I’m not one to take painkillers for something like this. I suppose the hardest part right now is that I tend to sleep on my right side, and that is simply not possible for more than a few minutes at a time. I’ll have to learn to sleep flat on my back, and I’ve never done that much during my whole life.

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0 Responses to Aging and Fitness Failures

  1. Jeanette Porell says:

    I am suffering with the same problem. Both my shoulders hurt if I try to use them certain ways and it radiates down my right bicep. I have been having chiropractic treatment and massage but nothing seems to help. I take turmeric and wild lettuce extract. But nothing helps for very long. I am still having problems with both my knees and my hip. I am just a mess. I am afraid to try to drive very long, like on a long trip to OKC. I doesn’t appear I will be able to visit the folks in Oklahoma ever again. I get so lonely to see the folks. We are paying lots of helpers to keep us mobile so we don’t have money to travel with our helpers. Doug is scheduled for a bronchoscopy Friday to see what is in his bronchial tube. Doc says he doubts it is cancer. I have a friend at church who is a seer and she thinks it is a fungus growth. I have no idea how that could happen. Pray for you mom and pop.

    Sent from Windows Mail

  2. Lately, with the aches, pains and injuries Paul & I have been dealing with we’ve taken to typing the type and location of the pain into a search engine and it’s often been really helpful. When the pain from my most recent issue, (the stupidly agonizing rib subluxation), just wasn’t resolving as fast as my physio gal thought it should, I couldn’t afford to go back to her. But after a long search on youtube I found a few simple stretches that did the trick. I like youtube because its not just ‘professionals’, but also people who have the actual problem sharing what worked for them.

  3. Jeanette – fungal overgrowth is super common and the reason so many bronchial (and sinus) issues don’t respond to antibiotics. Try giving him calendula marigold (tea or tincture). It can’t hurt and it could help. And try nettle for your joints, it could be your kidneys aren’t processing calcium properly.