Pissed off training with bursitis

[andy68]

Well my training is fucked!!, I'm sick of this sholder bursitis,(yes..it's sholder bursitis-had the ultrasound-refused the cortisone) been on the voltaren for 2 weeks-had to stop, now I take 10 fish oil..(EPA of 2.7grammes for the inflammation),it gets better then something pings it again, usually shit outside the gym, can't do press, bench, or cleans,...on the novice progression (progression-what a joke), I'm 45 years old,(100kg)..bit of fat bit of muscle, trained on and of for years-split routines,shit results..looks like I'll be going back to that in some form or other, I now do squat ,deadlifts ,chins as per novice progression 2-3 times a week, but will now be adding in some other stuff that dose not interfere with my sholder..I.e. Some sort of sholder work that dose not hurt (if possible) Seat row, biceps and tricep exercise..only 3 sets of each per workout split over the 3days...yes I know it's wrong, but what the fuck!....

[Bruce190]

I feel your pain Andy. My brother and I are both dealing w/shoulder issues. I've been doing presses and bench for about 3 weeks(?) now, but before that I was just doing what I could. I did single arm DB presses w/light wts for weeks because it was the only thing the shoulder would tolerate. Meaning it was only mildly painful. Didn't do bench at all for a while. Gradually I was able to increase weight until I made the transition to the barbell again. Same w/my brother. It c/b frustrating but you do what you can. The upside is that you are able to do squats DLs and chins. All great exercises. Take what you can get and bide your time. Your body is doing it's best to heal itself. Stay out of your own way and give it a chance.

[andy68]

Thanks Bruce, glad I'm not alone mate... Thanks for the info buddy, yea I'll keep on training the big lifts and throw in what I can until I heal..cheers

[Dastardly]

in b4 paging dastardly...

[andy68]

in b4 paging dastardly...

What?

[Dastardly]

Sorry, basically I am the self professed king of fucked shoulders around here. So I totally understand your situation and it seems you are on the right track of figuring this shit out. May I ask how your shoulder issues started?

I have had very unstable shoulders since childhood, I could never even throw a ball etc without IMMEDIATE sprain & damage to internal cartilage. So I was cautious about doing too much with arms and I guess this only made things worse. Went through very regular injuries, building up of scar tissue & weakness/atrophy. I have a number of ligament type injuries around my body, a ortho doc suggested I have congenitally poor quality connective tissue which makes sense.

In fact I only developed comfortable range of motion to lift arms above my head after starting to train.

My Lesson is;

ACCEPT your own joints. Pick exercises & modify technique so as to not aggravate your shoulders. Work on building up comfortable increased ROM through drills, passive work and both muscular & capsular stretching. When you find less injuresome but high value exercises (like bench press esp with close grip), do them at slightly reduced intensity so you can be ultra strict at the extremeties of ROM and use muscle tension to avoid damaging impingements. Modify programming to be more regular, higher volume but less intensity. Your main lifts should resemble the kind of training people would do as accessory/volume/hypertrophy work. But really HAMMER this stuff. Chins are usually pretty safe so hammer these too.

I tried very hard to beat my body into performing olympic lifts when in reality my shoulders would NEVER be functional enough, all I got was injured more. The most annoying thing is that my shoulders are so fucked that now I cannot safely do overhead lifts at all. But know that if I had just stuck to shitloads of submaximal, never to failure bench pressing + deadlifting and nothing else. I would be able to C&J or snatch more than I could have ever hoped to by actually training the lifts, and I would be much less injured.

I

[andy68]

Great post dastardly. Thanks for all the info mate its really helpful. I shal re read it all tonight again when I get in from work.
Yea not too sure how I fone my sholder but im sure it was when I was trying to do power cleans and fucked it up by following a bar path too far away from my body..and im getting auld...lol
Cheers mate and thanks again.
Andy (scotsman in australia)