Seriously, if you’re trying hard, you’re probably getting ready to fail.
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Some pics from the arthroscopy of my labrum before the repair. The top right pic is a healthy labrum. Kind of put my pre-op condition in perspective for me.
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It will give you better answers.
I have found this to be extremely true, and improving the quality of the questions which you use to approach anything is what I view as the most effective way increase the quality of the results. Immediately.
In that respect I have a goal that I strive towards. Questioning everything. I’m not there yet, but I’m getting better. I’m also getting better at getting better in multiple aspects of my life. I’ve had setbacks, and am far from perfection, but I am increasing the quality of the questions that I ask myself daily, and of course, the ones I use to approach my training.
The gym is one of the easiest places to start improving the quality of the questions you ask and the result you get from your body as a result.
Here’s something simple to try. When you go into the gym ask this, “what am I doing? why am I doing it?” Then after you leave look at what you actually did, and ask why. Did what you did align with your goals? Did it specifically address something that you are working towards? Or did you just do it because you always have, or because someone told you to, or because someone else in the gym was doing it?
Ask better questions, get better results. Simple.
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I finally fell over. It was bound to happen at some point. Especially with me now trying to “walk” on them with my legs in the air.
Of course, that wasn’t when I fell. It was when I was going down a flight of stairs. I was going very slowly too, because I was exhausted, and my pain had kicked up after doing a lot of crutch assisted walking and seeing how sitting treated me. So I just lost my balance and fell backwards.
Highly unpleasant as it put my hip at a 110 degrees of flexion. Tissue is still a bit swollen for that range of motion. Highly embarrassing, fortunately nobody was around. Which is why I’m putting it on the internet. It was really funny.
Stairs are my nemesis.
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“I’m not going to be able to keep my pants on for this movie!”
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at going up and down stairs on crutches. Also getting pretty good at walking with just a touchdown by the right foot with crutches. Got up to three sets of 60 feet today. I’ve been experimenting with how much time I spend on my crutches verses lying down as well. So far I’m not doing well with predicting when I should get off of them so I test every minute or so. The drugs probably aren’t helping with feedback.
The only bonus to my very limited mobility is that it is allowing me to catch up on a lot of reading and work on some articles. I’ll have some book reviews coming soon. Some more in-depth writing as well.
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Pain levels are still fluctuating throughout the day. High fatigue levels today. Spent a bit longer on the crutches, it was exhausting. Though I’m developing some awesome crutching skills. Right foot dorsiflexion a few degrees better today. Mind is still spinning from meds.
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I’ve been out of surgery two days now, and so far I’ve spent a lot of time on my couch/bed. Pain has been fluctuating up and down, I’m unsure right now of what I can associate with the increases that I occasionally experience throughout the day or at night, as it seems irrelevant to where I am at on my post op narcotics, or cold therapy.
My first full day out the most I managed was to hobble around ten feet on my crutches to the bathroom on occasion. I stepped it up tonight and made it to the front door of the house and back. Other than that my movement has been limited to micro movement with my ankles and feet. Even that is severely limited as I notice about a 15 degree difference in dorsiflexion from my left to right foot.
I’ll be testing more metrics tomorrow.
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I’ve been MIA for a while now, and a lot has happened in that time. I’ll have a lot of articles coming soon on where I’ve been and where I’m going. At the moment though I’m just out of surgery for hip labram repair and osteoplasty. So here are my thoughts that I had regarding that prior to getting cut.
Pre-op Reflections
I’ve made some highly questionable decisions in my past. Recently, a lot of those have come back at me and I’ve been dealing with them face on for the first time in my life. One of the major ones I’ve been looking at lately is the string of actions and decisions that led to me requiring surgery to deal with some mechanical issues in my right hip.
I’ll start with a bit of background. In August of 2007 I had a cycling crash where I t-boned the side of a car going over 30mph. The immediate result of this was acute pre-patellar bursitis in my left knee and generally being banged up and covered in road rash. I was incredibly lucky to walk away from the crash in that condition as the general medical opinion seemed to be that I should have died.
I spent the better part of the next year putting almost all my weight on my right leg and changing my gate to accommodate the rather prolonged recovery of my left knee. At the time it was not something I thought much of, but we should always remember that we never stop adapting. A while into the following year, and some heavy training cycles that I was into at the time, I began experiencing what I though was iliopsoas tendonitis, and some severely limited range of motion in my right hip extension. I rested, let the inflammation go down, and continued business as usual. The injury came back. I did the same thing. This cycle repeated itself with range of motion getting worse, and longer times without training for the next 3 years. Somehow during all of this I maintained the firm belief that I could fix this on my own.
In late May of this year I finally mentioned the issue in an offhand manner to my primary care physician while discussing something else. This got me sent in for a bone scan with the idea that I might have a recurring stress fracture. Cut to several more tests, and MRI arthogram, and it turns out I have a massive labral tear and some excess bone growth causing a cam impingment. Info on these here.
Looking back this is something that I quite possibly could have addressed some time ago and possibly avoided a lot of current pain. What to take away from this? Mainly, that doing the same thing over and over expecting different results is not a good idea. I seemed to forget everything I knew in my obsession to fix myself without medical assistance. Also, being a stubborn idiot is not all its cracked up to be.
As of now, I will be going into surgery for hip arthroscopy. I’m looking towards progressing forward again. I will be documenting my recovery both in terms of my physical and mental state throughout. My starting points are as follows-
Physically
• Severely limited range of motion in all planes with right hip
• Severe tissue damage and inflammation around the right hip
• High pain levels associated with most movement
• Limit to almost all activity due to pain and limited ROM
Mentally
• Lack of forward progress due to physical issues and mental blocks
• Obsession issues
• Dealing with long term substance dependency
• Depression
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