Health

“Strength doesn’t come from what you can do. It comes from overcoming the things you once thought you couldn’t.”

At the time writing I have been diagnosed with a anteroinferior labral tear in the right shoulder and am awaiting a surgeons opinion as to the options going forward. I think surgery is inevitable. What ever the outcome, I plan on leading through the problem.

Injuries will happen

If men start an exercise regime that is goal orientated and difficult, it is inevitable that we will get injuries along the way to improving ourselves. Changes in routine, fading gains and frustration at our own vulnerabilities are all obstacles we as men need to overcome. Funnily enough we are in fact mortal and made of soft tissue.

As my wife has reminded me constantly for 20 years, I’m not indestructible. When we get injured, we face only two options. Do we embrace it and work around it or do we settle for the soft, comfortable and sedentary option as we justify our lack of effort to those around us? They really are the only two options. Find a way forward or settle for mediocrity whilst making weak excuses. That’s it.

Keep your injury in perspective

In 2015 I herniated a disc in my lower back which had impinged the nerve root running into my left leg. The injury was accumulative over time and came on quickly. The pain was horrendous. The left butt cheek felt like a red-hot knife was being stabbed into it. My left femur felt hot, but the skin on the thigh felt numb and cold. My left calf muscle was in a constant cramp. The left ankle felt like it was being crushed in a vice and the two outside toes on my left foot made me think that I had an unpaid gambling debt out there and someone had smashed them both with a hammer. It was that good.

The emotional toll was the worst. I would start the day after broken sleep having woken up to take more pain relief in the middle of the night so the number of medications wouldn’t drop too low by morning. With genuine fear of moving, I would get out of bed and stand in the shower sobbing in agony as the nerves started firing up sending mixed messages back to my brain. The concoction of drugs could only do so much. At my lowest point I calculated that if the doctors couldn’t do anything for me, I would probably make it a year before begging them to cut the leg off or suicide.

It was the darkest time of my life and I just couldn’t understand why it was happening to me.

Don’t let the darkness in

Two months after the start of the worst period of my life, I was laying on the couch in the middle of the night with my head in my wife’s lap crying. I had surgery in 7 hours and was fasting and had stopped all pain relief medication in preparation for the surgery. The nerve pain was now in full effect as the nerve blocking drugs in my system were fading. My wife asked me ‘why it had gotten so bad all of a sudden?’. “Because it knows I’m going to kill it in 7 hours” was my response.

Fast forward 12 hours and the Neurosurgeon had carefully cut away the section of the disc that was causing me so much pain. I owe my life to him. Coming out of the fog of the aesthetic I could tell there was a major difference. The Sciatica was mostly gone. The site where the surgery had happened was incredibly painful, but my left leg no longer begged for amputation. My sense of relief was amazing. I saw a future again and maybe, just maybe, I wouldn’t be medically discharged from the Army. I knew the first day after the operation that rehabilitation was now my main effort. Failure to rehabilitate meant failure. It meant a loss of purpose, self esteem and security. So as much as it hurt, and as the little weak bitch voice in my brain complained, I got out of the bed and started walking the ward.

Make the choice to rehabilitate

Before I got injured, I had been doing a decent amount of road cycling for cardio-vascular work and some weight training. Two weeks after surgery I tentatively got back to exercising. I had very little fitness or endurance after being sedentary for so long. The pain wasn’t completely gone and I was scared of doing too much. Walking with some of the older guys early in the morning at work was all I could manage to start with. It was at this point I started to think that this was as good as it was going to be for me now.

I recall the moment I made the decision though. I was waiting at a set of traffic lights and had a moment of clarity. I could fall into the category of people that have nothing but weak excuses and stories about how fit they used to be or I could bite down and power out of this boggy hole of self-pity. I chose the latter option.

Set realistic and achievable goals

The absolute worst thing you can do is set unrealistic goals. Set achievable ones and celebrate them when you concur another one. Scrub it off the list and keep moving. For me, the bicycle became the tool I would use to get better. I captured the data of every ride and compared results. I tracked my improvements and scrutinized the dips. Getting up early and putting the work in became the difference between living a good life with meaning and purpose or staying in the fog of excuses and mediocrity.   

4 months later I participated in a 100 km road race in the local area which included a mountain climb. I was never a contender for a place on a podium, but the real podium was in my head. I suffered horribly that day and finished in front of my wife and children who waved and cheered as I rode past to the finish line. There was no crowd waiting for me. No one other than my immediate family knew what I had over come and no one cared other than them. For me though, I felt like I had my manhood back. I’d physically gone out there and accomplished something hard and my body was resilient again. It was hard, tough and it could suffer for a cause.

So, this current shoulder problem? It’s nothing. It’s merely a distraction. I have overcome so much more than this. I will come back stronger and better than before.    

Now stop feeling sorry for yourself and go!

“You can’t read about push ups. You gotta do them.”

Gary Vaynerchuk

The push up would have to be the oldest yet most valid measure of a mans upper body strength and endurance since there has been the concept of physical exercise. It consists of two movements, that being a ‘down’ and an ‘up’, yet offers so many benefits for the poor guy or girl doing them. No fancy equipment or clothes required. You’ve got everything you need already. Your body and gravity.

Of course, there are many variations of a push up. You can just do boring old push ups where your hands are slightly wider than your shoulders underneath your upper body and your feet are slightly apart as you keep your torso and hips in a straight line as you push out the repetitions. The whole time without sagging in the lower back as your core strength starts to fail you on your way to the illusive 100.

Or maybe you want to do the wide push ups where you engage more of your shoulders and chest whilst you have one foot across the heel of the other. Even a narrower positioning of the hands so you bend more at the elbow and engage more of the triceps for that arm pump before going out on a Friday night in a tight T-shirt. Either way, no matter what you’re going for, there is a push up for you. The important thing is that you do them.

How do you improve push ups quickly?

Can’t knock out a respectable 20 without a break? Fine. Do what you can, then drop to your knees and finish the rest. Incorporating a variation that makes it a bit easier isn’t something to be ashamed of. You should also be working your push ups to complete failure as well in order to get better at them. If you’re not, then you’re not really doing push ups are you?

Setting up a simple session of push ups is easy. You can incorporate them as an activity you do in-between rounds of other exercises or have them as a finishing exercise at the end of a run or walk. Just find 10 minutes after a run to do as many push ups as you can do in a minute with 1 minute rest. 5 minutes of push ups with 5 minutes rest. Easy right?

What are the additional benefits of simple push ups?

The humble push up is something that works nearly all of your body. Not only is it engaging your chest and arms, but it’s working your core strength as well by forcing you to tighten and lock together your entire abdominal wall and muscles in your lower back. Don’t believe it? Just hold the push up raised position for 2 minutes by itself and see if you start shaking. If you don’t, you’re either not doing it properly or you don’t need to be reading this.   

Setting out a daily routine for a month where you start the day with 50 push ups and end it with another 50 will start you on the path to some serious male self-improvement. Your periods of rest and need to break the 50 up into sets will diminish faster than you think as you adapt. Your body won’t be the only thing to start getting hard either. Your mind will as well and that’s half the battle. Physical pain and healthy suffering will fortify your mind and give you the ability to keep discomfort in context. Remember that when you’re training your body, you’re training your mind to be harder and fitter as well.   

The important thing is that you start.

Go!

Physically empowering yourself

Why should you want to change your physical appearance? Maybe you want to be bigger across the shoulders and chest. Maybe you want to be leaner so you can attract a better partner. Or maybe you just want to feel better and wear those jeans you haven’t been able to fit into for a while. If you’re reading this you’ve probably figured out that your physicality within society sets you apart from the pack. Unfortunately for most of us, we’re just not born with it. It needs to be earned.

You already know what it takes to change your appearance and physique. And that’s effort. Others seem to possess and maintain a physique that the marketing profession has elevated to such a point, where unless you’re a professional athlete, it is almost impossible to attain. So, let’s get realistic. As a man who cares about his health and well-being, trying to look like a male model in a fitness magazine is unrealistic. The amount of time and discipline those men dedicate to maintaining that appearance is a full-time job within itself. You don’t have time to work out twice a day for 2-3 hours each session whilst living off seven meals a day of steamed chicken and broccoli.

Your first challenge is to stop worrying about how you look or what people might think at this stage. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you start. Confucius once said ‘a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step’. Your first step needs to be towards eating healthier (that’s another blog) and making small changes in your daily routine. Trying to make a massive correction all at once doesn’t work. It actually sets you up for failure because huge change is unsustainable and it needs to habitual. Before diving deep on diet, let’s just cut out excessive sugar and start exercising.

Small changes matter

The cutting out of sugar can start just by not adding it to drinks like coffee or tea. Start there and then progress to cutting out carbonated drinks. More on that later, but right now it’s about starting to get more active. It’s nothing to be afraid of and you can do it today. Just start walking. If you’re coming off the couch and that’s the best you can achieve, then start there. Walk for at least 30 minutes a day every day, either morning or night for the first week. You don’t even need fancy shoes yet. Just walk at a brisk pace where you maintain an elevated heart rate and respiratory rate for the whole 30 minutes. If you’re so overweight that your confidence is shot and you worry what you look like, do it at night. But do it. Walk everyday like your life depends on it. Because it does.

Now that you’re out and hitting the road every day, start documenting your walks with a fitness application on your smart phone. Download one like ‘Strava’ and create a profile. You don’t need to share it if you don’t want to, but I recommend you do. Think about accountability and the positive reaction your friends will have when they see you are stepping up and swiping your man card. You’ll be able to see after just one week that your 30 minute walks are now starting to cover longer distances in the same time. The results you’ll see in ‘Strava’ will give you a little more motivation to walk faster.

Your confidence will start to grow and you’ll want to do more. Why? Because men are naturally competitive and need to be. Embrace it and start competing against yourself and your own doubts. Then step up your game to walking twice a day. Morning and night. Don’t over think it. Just do it. Sacrifice a little sleep and get out there whilst you start the day in a positive way.

Give yourself no excuses

Right now if you’re walking for a total of one hour a day and you’ve cut away all the extra sugar you should start feeling better. Be confident and don’t overthink it. Of course your physical goals will take time, effort and sacrifice. Anything worth aspiring to takes those things. Especially time. Don’t start thinking there are get ripped quick programs. They don’t exist. You have to put the work in. Your goal should be to start making small changes right now. Later will take care of itself.

Doing something physically difficult is important for men to do every day.

Go!