Neat back photo

In the "money where my mouth is" department, I took some fitness progress photos yesterday. I particularly liked this one of my back. The lighting was a little weird to start with; plus, I played with the levels a little in Photoshop to make the muscles stand out.

I think it's a fairly decent lat spread, considering that I only started working my lats six months ago (and haven't been lifting heavy lately due to coddling my left shoulder*)

* I managed to sprain my acromioclavicular joint (also known as a Type I AC joint injury). I didn't mention it in the blog as it didn't impact my motorcycling at all.

This week ended the Meltdown Challenge that I was doing with the fitness message board I'm on. So now I need some new goals (without goals, I sit on the couch and watch Buffy even more than I already do).

I'm thinking of making my next goal point the Sport-Touring.net West Coast Regional Meet. It's exactly 2 months from now, which is a perfect time frame for me, fitness wise. Plus, a weekend of friends and lots of riding is a perfect "reward".

If anyone reading this comes to the WCRM: ask me about my fitness goals and I'll buy you a beer. Promise. :)

Comments

[Steve]

Hey, nice lats!

[sharad]

Nice work! How'd you manage to sprain your AC joint? I tore mine to bits (grade 3 separation due to an unanticipated get-off on my road bicycle) but was able to get back to pretty much everything in a couple of months.

Kinda wished I had just broken the clavicle, but my bones seem to be stronger than my ligaments...

[wookiee]

You might could kick my ass.

[carolyn]

Hee! Sharad, the story is actually pretty boring: bad posture.

As I'm lazy, here's a copy-n-paste from my post to the fitness board:

"Oh, and I now have an actual name for my shoulder problem: I have a non-displaced sprain of the acromioclavicular joint, also known as "shoulder separation". Basically, it's a sprain of the ligaments that hold the clavicle and acromion process of the scapula together (nothing to do with the rotator cuff).

The weird thing is that most people get them from some sort of trauma to the shoulder, which I never had. The working theory is that my horrific posture when studying and working compressed my T3 (i think) vertebrae, knocking it out of alignment, which in turn knocked my first rib out of alignment...that then inflammed the muscles in the area, most notably the subclavius and sternoscapularis muscles, which are supposed to hold the clavicle in place and keep it from, y'know, separating from the acromion. "

An interesting piece of trivia -- I still can't do pectoral exercises because of this. You'd think it'd affect the shoulder press, lat raises, etc, and it does to a certain extent; the most damaging and painful move by far, though, is the bench press. Sigh.

[sharad]

You're right, anything involving the pecs is more difficult with AC joint problems. I still haven't gotten my bench press weight back to the pre-injury status (this is 3 years later), but I'm close. There's no pain at this point, just a general feeling of instability along that movement axis. My working hypothesis is that the scapula has more freedom to move around.

the best you can do is to take it easy and back off on the weights until the pain is gone. Oh, and sit up straight when you're studying ;)

[Roman Vasquez]

I have a third degree AC joint separation too. I still can't do bench press. But I will press on.

[carolyn]

Wow, creepy, I was *just* posting on my fitness message board about this same exact topic.

I'm finally giving up on the bench presses and barbell squats. Yeah, yeah, I know, it's like a year after this original post but I did want to keep giving it a shot.

I just wound up getting frustated, though, because my shoulder couldn't support the barbell weight I wanted for my legs, plus the bench presses still invariably result in massive amounts of pain.

So...I've switched indefinitely to seated leg extensions and dumbbell squats for the quads and am just cutting out the chest work completely. Sigh. Lame, but at least I'm far happier doing 100+ pound leg entensions than I was doing 25 lb barbell squats that did nothing for my quads and inflamed my shoulder.