thread of getting sw0le

Yeah, I guess in the back of my head I've known for a while that I would have to bite the bullet and see a doctor. I was just blindly hoping that it would get better on its own eventually, like the other injuries I've sustained so far in my life. Anyway, thanks for the replies - it helps to have some rational, outside opinions to push me in the right direction. Like I said above, i'm pretty scared of what a doctor might tell me, but it's ultimately the only path to recovery at this point and I would be foolish to let my cowardice get in the way of actually feeling better

Are you in the USA? If you have access to a physiatrist, I prefer that specialty to orthopedics when it comes to lower back diagnosis and treatment (oh hi I have a degenerating L disk and have seen all the doctors and done all of the things except surgery).

That's supposed to be Lfive disk, but my numeral five (and six, and the dash) are all broken on my circling the drain chromebook.

With regard to both training issues and injury issues: if Internet-informed doing it yourself isn't helping, there are folks who make a living at helping you with this stuff. This is also true with regard to every other thing in the world.

hey stevie, two things i would do which have already been said i think, plus one thing no one has said:

experiment with fewer reps, more weight and more sets on your barbell bench press. i.e. 10-8-6 with heavier progression then drop a bit for a set of 8.
do a dumbbell bench press instead of your incline bb bench
imagine you're shoving someone you love into an upside-down bed

keep your concentration curls imo, they're great. fuck the curl-haters.

think about adding some dips or push-ups

also one thing i'm learning way too recently is that your lats should be engaged when you bench and your elbows should be close to your torso. i connected with this article about it:

https://www.bodybuilding.com/content/the-biomechanics-of-a-safe-strong-bench-press.html

this article is VERY LONG but the basic gist of it has really helped my bench: https://www.strongerbyscience.com/bench-press-bar-path/

Quincie, I am in the US. San Francisco to be exact - shot in the dark, but if you happen to be in the bay area I would appreciate a physiatrist recommendation

I’m on the other coast, sorry!

Alan Thrall vids helped me a lot on bench bar path/form. The idea that the bar path is not straight up and down is counterintuitive at first yet makes perfect sense once you learn to do it. Thrall says it helps to think of the way you would naturally shove someone away from you -- your hands would start below your chest but wind up at your chest level when fully extended.

Or I guess more accurately starts around your lower chest and ends at/slightly above your upper chest.

I am very far from stole right now. In January I detached my tibialis anterior ligament in January and after nearly a month stubbing around thinking it was gout or a sprain ended up having surgery to reattach it. Am seriously missing any kind of exercises. I've been flat on my back for the last week but even before that I was unable to do anything. Positively champing at the bit to get into physio but that's still three weeks away.

imagine you're shoving someone you love into an upside-down bed.

as part of the bench press! sometimes it's even a good idea to hold them there for an extra second or two.

so your suggestion would be:

flat barbell bench
flat dumbbell bench
dumbbell shoulder press

and then no incline?

map may disagree, but I think it's better to do the dumbbell press on an incline, it's just easier and less risk of injury that way.

it’ll help your over head press as well.

uh oh I guess everyone's going to have to have a lift-off to determine whose advice I'll take

Big time lurker here, but just wanted to respond to the guy with the lower back injury: I had a massive lower back injury when I was about 23. Ended up being a slipped disc. Kept me off my feet for a month, took me a long time to recover. Was just as emotionally devastating as it was physically.

I'm 32 now and in better shape than I've ever been. Lifting weights helped me strengthen my lower back again, and now it's like it never happened. Still irritate the injury once in a while, but keeping myself in shape has kept my recovery time down to a week or two at most.

BUT, I had to take a lot of time to recover to make sure my back was totally okay. For me it took a year or two (had never been to the gym when the injury happened, was pretty out of shape). You've gotta be really patient with yourself, better to take the time to heal now in your 20s, than push yourself and mess up your back for life.

Definitely go see a doctor, first. The news won't be as bad as you're expecting, I'm sure. I ended up getting some pain killers and anti-inflammatories that I took for a couple weeks. People injure their backs all the time. You should get any medical help you need, and just take the time to recover. It might seem frustratingly slow, but be patient with your body. Take the time to recover now so you don't pay the price in the future.

I do incline, bench, and flies. Different muscle groups on each.

Have a similar disc story to Travissss above, but as I FUCKIN' HATE pain pills, I went out of pocket to an anestheologist/pain specialist and got a spinal so that I could start strengthening PT right away (this was with doctor approval -- I lived across the street from a sports ortho clinic at the time and them dudes knew what they were doing.). That was absolutely the right decision for me -- remaining sciatica is minor, and only shows up when the weather is changing the day after I do my back work-out.

eating a pit beef sandwich and fries for lunch and leaving work early is the recipe for the best bench press sesh

that sounds delightful

i should add that this beef was very rare, it was still moving, it made me as strong as a bull

damn Ed that sounds awful! i hope you mend soon

peace and light to all your lower backs

damn my squat anxiety post is from a year ago:

"there is something mental, about fearing for my low back, that magnifies all the (relatively minor) stresses of squatting. like i said, it's not completing the rep but committing to the descent where i'm failing. i've tried to rebuild confidence by resetting but it hasn't done the trick :/ "

it really hasn't gotten any better, it's the weirdest thing. i've bounced around at sub 150lb weights, with some different set volumes, since then.

shame of shames, i've started using the smith machine, 4x5, 2x week, steady progression. my plan is so keep nudging up to somewhere over my bodyweight and then go back to the free bar at say 135.

all of the bro advice about how to get thru mental barriers is about as good as bro advice about everything else ie not.

also ftr i died lolling at goole's "absolutely disgusting" comment. the clip at the end of the weight peg is the icing.

― macropuente (map), Wednesday, February 27, 2019 4:54 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

my only temptation to SPEAK TO A MANAGER is i reeeally want my Y to buy a stand-alone weight rack for the bumper plates on the olympic platform. the platform sits kind of between/in front of two power racks, and the bumper plates are all on the power racks' pegs. i've typed too many words about this but everybody fucks up where they go. people load up bars to squat with half narrow plates, half bumper plates, it's lunacy, i hate it

when my gym opened the bumper plates were of course perfectly evenly distributed and everything had a home. now there are racks that have way too many 45s to fit in the right place so more are sitting on the pegs along with the 25s, 35s, and non-bumper 45s. also some 45s have migrated from where the sleds are. it reminds me of an old cankles post where he proposed to eliminate STDs by only allowing people to have sex with others of the same age (i may be misremembering this). eliminate gym mess by only ever putting a plate back from where you got it.

Isn’t that the basic rule of using a thing? Put it back where it came from.

you would think but in my gym it seems to be forbidden

most people at mine are pretty good with plates but it annoys me that there's always the same bench in the way of putting plates on the bar in the squat rack because there's a smith machine in between the squat racks and of course people want to use a bench for the smith machine and of course the bench ends up getting shunted off to one side or the other of the smith machine.

also there's this guy who shows up about 9-10 who literally paces the entire gym all the time and does this weird snap turn around when he's ready for his next leg of pacing and it DRIVES ME COMPLETELY FUCKING CRAZY.

my dream is to have our own gym only for this thread. we will enforce the gym rules on each other very harshly but we will have the best workouts & most fun

Stevie upthread, as a guy twice your age whose back is more or less fucked from doing strenuous things with bad posture, I have four things to say:

1. see a doctor - whatever has happened has happened, knowing what it is will not make it worse and even if you don't go for active treatment, you will know what's up and what not to do. All treatment is at your discretion so you decide what happens from there on, but you need information.

2. you will need to build up your core strength because the shooting pain is probably generated by muscles being locked tight to protect the injury - you need to work on boring core shit to give you a stable platform for the more "fun" strength stuff. Do not skip this, or you will accumulate compensations and adaptations which will put weird loads on other parts of your back and fuck you up really badly, and will either take years to un-train or may cause fun things like grinding down the articulating surfaces of your vertebrae permanently. The word "pilates" will come up in the conversation - do not be afraid.

3. if you do #2 it may be enough to get you out of trouble once you calm your reflexes and protective tension down. You may not need other treatment and you are allowed to do whatever you like with a doctor's advice, it's your life.

4. see a doctor.

Honest to goodness, harbl, the best gyms I've gone to have all started that way -- groups of serious lifters looking for a mellow place to work hard without bullshit. It's what I look for when I'm in a new place for a while.

you need to work on boring core shit to give you a stable platform for the more "fun" strength stuff

put this in giant type on the wall of the new sw0le gym imo

But lifters say you don't need core work because all of the lifts work your core.

However I am increasingly coming back around to believing in support work. I think I have certain muscle imbalances and bad habits that formed over a lifetime and that I can't break through without some serious targeted work.

it's true that most lifts work the core, which is a good argument in favor of heavy lifters doing more core work

if core strength is the weak link in the kinetic chain (i.e., it doesn't match or exceed the strength of the rest of the body) the core is probably where lifting form will break down first, which means the spine will flex or extend in ways it's not supposed to ... this is most likely to happen under near-maximum loads, which increase the amount of force pushing or pulling discs out of alignment ... if the imbalance between core strength and load gets too extreme, the best case is sore lower back muscles, the worst case is snap, crackle, pop

tl;dr core strength = spinal stability under load

to give the rant a more positive spin: the stronger your core, the better you can support dynamic start/stop and cutting moves and the more power you can transmit through your extremities, which is handy if you are an NFL wideout, MMA fighter, or badminton player ... also, strong core muscles look hot

what do yall do for core work?

i do an ashtanga 1 series with some mods for about 20-25 minutes, then

leg raises, 3 of 10
cable crunches, 3 of 15
dead bugs where i lower one leg and the opposite arm and raise back up to vertical then do the other side, 10 x each side
side planks, hold for 20 breaths

core heavy stuff in the yoga includes planks, warrior 1, chair pose with a twist. oh and boat pose.

i'm still not great at it but ujjayi breathing has been really helpful wrt my core

For core work, V crunches are wonderfully brutal - arms and legs straight, lower em down and then bring em together pointing at the sky. Realistically I'm usually lowering partway down; you'll see.

From a rehab/injury prevention perspective, I'd recommend doing the McGill Big Three and trying to fully own those moves before adding many other core exercises

that little article is much more informative about back injury and recovery than anything I've written on this thread

(note to self: do Big Three more)

dead bugs
planks NOT holding for a long time, like 30-40 seconds of good solid plank
leg raises holding onto bench with my hands
should do more stuff it's good for me

Squats and deadlifts are pretty good for the core. I super-set planks in between squat and deadlift assistance (lighter weight, higher rep squats and deadlifts). I hold for 1 m for five sets. I should probably do more.

For the fear of squats post upthread, I recommend doing pause squats to get used to being in "the hole". They helped me quite a bit with axiety I had for both squats and bench. Plus they are just a good way to do them. Be sure to deload significantly.

Deadlifted for first time since strain. I added weight slow and paid extra attention to form. Stopped as soon as I felt the slightest twinge in the spot where I strained — at 265 lbs.

planks NOT holding for a long time, like 30-40 seconds of good solid plank

fully in support of not holding planks forever, like they should be real hard if you're doing them right??? lol it's probably just my heavy body.

i went heavy on shoulder presses today 🏋💪🏋💪🏋💪 #bouldershoulders ahh yeah baby

oops i accidentally knocked over a thing on the shelf my shoulders are too wide

Shoulders seem to be my strong point, OHP has always been ahead of my other lifts.

My hip/upper thigh bothered me for a few days after the last deadlifts, much less than last time but clearly there’s still something not right. I’m totally starting to get now the fact that those muscles are tightening up to try to prevent injury due to some kind of imbalance but I haven’t figured out how to fix it yet. Still, i took a video of my deadlift and my form is getting much better.

should i switch out my post-workout protein for something fancy like protein + a bunch of other stuff? or is it all hype? tbh I only work out 3x a week and my diet is not what it should be so idk how much it's going to matter, but i'm out of protein powder and need to buy some more anyway so

no just eat better food

and have regular protein powder