It is not every day that you wake up
feeling physically like shit and feel elated about it, but that is exactly what
happened to me this morning, after six months of mostly “meh” sensations. My
legs were so sore I could barely walk, most of my upper torso was stiff and
achy and not much mobile, my butt protested loudly when I asked it to maintain
an erect posture (another part of me seemed to be maintaining an erect posture
all by itself without much of me asking, which is always a superb indicator of
your body being in top notch condition, no matter how much the limbs without a
brain of their own protest) and getting to the kitchen to fetch me some
breakfast was a hideous chore. And I was ecstatic about it.
Not because I am especially fond of
physical discomfort, which if given the chance in abstract I would avoid as
much as the next bloke, but because of what had caused such level of achiness
and stiffness: for the first time in more than six months I was at the other
side of “the threshold”. What threshold? you may ask, and why is being at a
certain side of it of such value if it comes with such price? I’ll explain in a
moment, but for my readers to fully understand the significance of the achievement
I’ll need to go on a lengthy detour (in this blog! Go figure!) of how my
training life has been in these last six months, since I tore my left distal
biceps tendon from the bone in December.
Basically, every movement that
required some tension on the arms was off limits, even those that you would
expect to load only the triceps, but not the biceps (like bench presses, or
jerks). I guess the reason was that even when it doesn’t has to contract to
move the weight, the biceps acts as agonist of the prime mover, and thus has to
recruit some fibers to decelerate that prime mover, and even that partial,
half-assed, somewhat limp recruitment resulted to be painful as hell. So if
look back at my training log from those early days, while I visited different
doctors and went through various diagnosing devices, I see essentially all I
did was squatting and, surprisingly, deadlifting, as it was not painful at all
(given I used a double overhand grip, which forced me to substantially lower
the weights I could use). And man, did I squat: front squats, slow reverse
squats, jump squats and tons of low bar back squats (as I didn’t want to risk
inadvertently unloading the bar on the bent arms, I settled on high volume,
many reps with comparatively low weights). If in normal training conditions I squatted
between 4 and 6 tons a week I was soon squatting well above ten tons, even
twelve tons per week (not much more than squatting every day), with some longish
sets of deadlifts judiciously interspersed.
In the meantime, the consensus
between the physicians I saw was that I should have the tendon chirurgically
reattached, as there were no doubts that it was gone for good:
(Admittedly, there was one
dissenting doctor that thought that the tendon was still there, but I have to
confess I can’t make heads or tails of any sonogram… when my wife was pregnant
and we looked at the supposed portraits of our future kid I couldn’t
distinguish his arm from his dick either, so it may be some defect in my visual
processing system…)
As sonograms are somewhat crude and
they don’t discriminate so precisely between different soft tissues (and the
inner elbow seems to be a quite messy hodgepodge of different interlocked
fibers), I went through a fMRI just to be sure of what was going on:
Somehow that cleared any lingering
doubts in the doctors’ minds, as they could see as clearly as fresh water that
the tendon was broken and surgery was the most advisable option if I wanted to
lead an active lifestyle, and continue doing that lifting thing I seemed to
enjoy so much.
So I settled in a “zombie” routine
of lower body, maintenance training, while I waited for the nurse to call me
for an appointment as soon as an operating room became available (something
that has taken a surprising amount of time, which makes you wonder about the supposed
advantage of private medicine –I am fully covered by insurance- over public one).
But a funny thing happened. I occasionally attempted to go back to bench
presses, to somehow slow down a bit the atrophy that I could see was taking
over my pectoralis major. And when I finally found that I could press the empty
bar without pain I started increasing the amount of reps. And when I reached 60
reps I started increasing weight…
In the meantime, I could not avoid toying
with the idea of using this slowdown to straighten up a bit my cleaning
technique, so interspersed some power cleans, also with the empty bar, focusing
on keeping the arms straight, propelling the bar up with the hips and not
involving the biceps at all (as any attempt to “row” the bar up with the arms was pretty
excruciating). You probably know where this is going, in a few weeks I had
exhausted the increase in total number of reps and had started to slowly and
tentatively increase weights.
Which takes me to a couple weeks
ago, when I was feeling a bit frisky after finishing ten sets of bench press
doubles with 102,5 kg (about 225 pounds), a semi respectable number that wouldn’t
have looked too shabby even when I had a “healthy” arm. The previous session I had cleaned 90 kg (200 pounds) for a double (btw, with as nasty a technique as ever, bending the arms too soon and keeping the chest too far forward for most of the 1st pull, which makes for a super-shabby transition to the 2nd one) and I wondered if a
pull up would be feasible, just to check. With this result:
Well, that was shocking. You are not supposed
to do pull ups without a biceps tendon. How are you supposed to flex the arm
against the weight of your own body? Now the pull up is tricky, as it involves
less of the biceps and more of the latissimus dorsi. A good test of the overall
biceps functionality would be a pull up (w hands pronated), and an even better
one would be a chin up (hands supinated). More so with some added weight. So I
attempted this:
Not only could I chin with 15
additional kilos hanging from my waist, but I could launch the bar from my
shoulders and stabilize it overhead (something I couldn’t even dream of soon
after getting injured; believe me, I tried). Damn! What else was I capable of
doing, and had (may be unnecessarily) avoided these last months, becoming
pitifully weak in the process? Snatches? Behind the neck snatch grip push
presses (aka Klokov presses)?:
Check and check. Double damn, so was
there something I couldn’t do? How much strength had I lost? I knew pretty well
where I was from a squatting perspective (above 150 any day of the week, and in
160-170 territory after a couple of weeks of tapering) but there is a purest
test of brute force: how much could I deadlift? What about 180 no belt and with
heeled weightlifting shoes?
Well, 180 in such conditions (and it
wasn’t even a grinder, although the form was a bit off) means I can confidently
pull 200 with minimal tapering. Pity I already missed Spain’s powerlifting cup,
as it would have been as good an occasion as any to make my competition debut.
Probably next year.
Now seeing that I can do any move I
can think off without pain, with weights close to my personal bests ever, am I
still thinking in letting a physician make a small incision in my inner elbow,
drill through my radius bone, make multiple cuts in a bunch of tissue that he
identifies as the remains of my tendon (so it attaches to the bone), pass it
through the hole and nail it on the other side? Nope, I don’t have the
slightest intention of doing that. Right now it is full speed ahead to recover
the strength I’ve lost after half a year of almost non-existent upper body
training (more noticeable in any overhead movement, which were entirely
absent). Afterwards, we will see.
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