Mark has never failed to inspire. Early March and
after three years of training, he celebrated his
60th birthday with 100 single-arm beast (48kg)
swings in 5 minutes. The next day, he rucked 6
miles with 60lbs.
Almost exactly one year ago, I wrote about my
shoulder pain for the first time. It got worse
last November when I did my first 10x32kg TGUs.
That forced me to take December off. This month,
I have been able to work exclusively with the 32kg.
So the 24kg to 32kg jump took about 14 months.
Here are the things that I learnt.
One root cause for the pains could be my
internally rotated shoulders and forward-hanging
head. Both Mark and Ric told me about my posture
problems. I have been trying to fix them by
conciously pushing back my neck during the day and
sleeping on the hardwood floor at night. The
awareness by itself has been very helpful.
For the last few weeks, I have been trying hanging
on a pullup bar. It invariably made the pain go
away. For this idea, I had to thank Professor
Maxwell who told the story of a well-known doctor
giving up surgery and telling people with shoulder
pains to "just hang."
Surya Namaskar helps. These days, I usually wake
up with shoulder pains and 50 SNs fix it for the
morning. Of course, I still feel it later in the
day but yoga puts me on the right track.
The shoulder is an intricate structure and as my
posture improves the pain could be just part of
the training making me strong. As long as I am
pushing my limits pain is expected.
