I wanted to keep it on the cardio side today since my legs and arms are sore from yesterdays training. Grace and I took a nice little stroll up the ridge at Runyon. She carried the 20 lb kettlebell and I stopped at 5 different spots to do a quick set of 15 pushups. At the base of the hill Grace showed me some of the crazy leg ups they do at Crossfit where you dead hang from the bar and bring your feet to the bar! I decided to just hang from the bar because my left shoulder has always stopped me from doing any type of pullup or heavy overhead presses. I grabbed the bar with a shoulder width overgrip and was surprised when I got to the bar that my shoulder was not giving me the typical radiating pain I normally get when trying to do this. It felt good enough that I decided to try some pullups. From a dead hang each time I did 4 full pullups! I expected my shoulder to be screaming at me when it was done but it felt pretty much like the right shoulder, a little worked but more or less normal.
I am convinced now that kettlebell training has an inherent therapeutic effect on the entire body. I've been doing yoga for a long time and have good shoulder flexibility and strength but even then an attempt at a pullup could of put my shoulder down for a month if I was not careful. My laymens thoughts on it are that proper kettlebell technique somehow teaches the body how to distribute the kettlebells weight throughout the trainers body. I believe this effect strenghens the entire body and slowly forces the weaker body parts to match the strength of the non-injured body parts. I believe that 3-4 months of semi-regimented kettlebell training has nearly fixed my shoulder! I will blog about this again in the future because I dont want to get ahead of myself. Lets see how the shoulder feels in the morning lol.
oh, and fwiw, about the shoulder - I was about 20 years old and my taekwondo club was visiting another tkd club. This particular club we were visiting trained with the "hogu" which is that big heavy chest pad they use for Olympic style sparring. At that point all I did was point sparring. Point sparring was a little bit dangerous but the whole idea was for your kicks and punches to get extremelly close to your opponent but not actually hit them. I was good at point sparring because I could put my roundhouse real close to my opponents heads without hitting them. This enabled me to accidentally bloody at least 2 different guys noses and I never really got hit. I was good at point sparring but as it turns out terrible at Olympic style sparring.
I think I sparred Olympic style wearing the hogu for 15 seconds until my opponent jumps up, spins in the air and back kicks my left shoulder with his heel at pretty much full strength. My shoulder pops totally out of the socket. I could feel it when it came out and I could feel it hanging there. Luckily I was young and stupid enough not to freak out too much as I collapsed to the floor, possibly screaming? The instructor from the other school must of known what he was doing because he told me to sit up. He came up behind me putting his arm under my left shoulder and I thought for a second he was going to try and pick me up. Little did I know that this was when it was gonna get really bad. He instead just picked up the entire left side of my body while holding my left wrist to the ground and BOOM! Shoulder pops back in and the pain really set in! I sat in the corner for the rest of class. The arm hurt like a bitch for about a month but then slowly it just started getting better. I never saw the doctor for it and it has been giving me chronic pain for more than 20 years since.
I'm gonna do 10 pullups one day. at least
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