Friday, March 25, 2016

Recovery Week #6

Monday: An unreasonable snow day call gave me an unreasonable amount of free time yesterday. I wished that meant that I hiked a mountain or went for a long ride up the coast, but hanging with Alex and then later with my childhood friend Brent and his son Owen was a good substitute. Knee felt pretty good all day. I did the myrtl routine and a 30 min spin on the trainer. Sometime mid-day I got so bored I vaccumed, cleaned, scrubbed, protected, conditioned, (add any other number of cleaning verbs) the car which was desperately needed. Looks and smells good... for the moment... Real exciting stuff, right? One day closer to running...

Tuesday: Saw Physical Therapy for my first official visit. The goal there is to get a little more guidance and get some treatment that I can't do on my own. The first visit was pretty tame.. we mostly just talked about the past 5 weeks and the details of the surgery. I was given a list of pretty basic exercises to do a few times each day. Hit the gym after PT for 20 minutes on the recumbent trainer and did the exercises I was prescribed.

Wednesday: Rest day. I did the PT stuff once and iced a bit but nothing else.

Thursday: 15 minutes steady spinning before Lift Day! 4 sets on the bench (10@95, 10@115, 6@135, 8@125) and a new 20s-PR of 135 using the big 45 # plates for the first time since I was 15. In something like 5 or 6 sessions I was able to move form 95 lbs to 135 lbs which is surprising.. It's nowhere close to the satisfaction of seeing running improvements, but a PR is a PR and it's nice to have an area where I can see real gains for a change.

Perhaps even more notably, right after I finished my last set, I stood up, turned around and saw a high school aged kid trapped with about 170 lbs of barbell on his face. I immediately jumped behind the bar and held it so he could get out. The amazing part is he had a buddy who was supposed to be spotting but apparently got distracted by an attractive lady across the way, and left him mid-set. Amazing.

I finished the day with shoulder press, lat pull-downs, curls, and tricep extensions all with new PRs. Afterwards I ran through my PT exercises. Find them here if you're curious: http://orthoassociates.com/_pdfs/PFS_Strengthening_Exercises.pdf 

Friday: 15 minutes on the bike followed by 3 sets of PT exercises plus the MYRTL routine. I added some additional planks and med ball exercises. Too much detail to write out here, but it took about 45 minutes total. I listened to a great podcast with the premise of how mentality trumps physical ability in sport, even at a physiological level. Find it on iTunes by SportsCoachRadio. It's called "Mind over Muscle: Using mental fitness to become world class". Pretty cool stuff! I'd recommend most of the stuff on SportsCoachRadio, actually.

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