Kicked In The Balls By Reality

There's a great cartoon that you've probably seen of a man and a woman looking into a mirror.

On one side there's an overweight slob of a guy who see's an adonis reflected back at him - he's a happy guy.

On the other is an attractive women who sees an overweight, bedraggled image reflected back at her - she's not so happy.

24 hours ago that would have made me smile. Haha, yeah us guys are numpties and women worry about the size of their bums, haha.

But not today.

Today that cartoon is too close to home to be funny. Cos I realised I'm like the guy in the cartoon.

I've had some shoulder issues lately. Doing a push press weeks ago I felt something "go" a little in the front of the shoulder.

Obviously I took non of my own advice, kept training and irritated it further.

This has led to a month of pretty lax training til yesterday I'd had enough of excuses and my own nonsense, it was time to stop just hoping it would go away and let me crack on with doing the stuff I want to do, it was time to get myself fixed.

So I set up the video camera to assess my movement and see what the hell is going on.

These assessments are all with the shirt off to see how the shoulder moves.

I haven't trained for a while now.

But I've been a pretty fit guy.

Ran marathons, deadlifted 2.5 x my body weight, ran 5km in under 17 minutes.....all this was quite a while ago (the last marathon was 2009) but in my head I was still that guy.

I could even see that guy in the mirror.

But that wasn't the guy I saw on camera.

This guy looked soft, with wonky shoulders that were different heights, tired puffy face, love handles and an out of position pelvis.

The view of my back gives a clear indication of why the shoulder doesn't feel too good.

The long downward slope of my shoulders are a pretty clear sign that my latissimus muscles (back muscles) are in a shortened position, even more so on the right side. This makes getting my arms overhead very difficult without creating some compensations else where in my body.

One of the key aspects for my training is to create some good length in them, to fire up the muscles at the top of the shoulder (upper traps) and to create good stability where the head of my arm bone meets the socket.

Without these being in a better position I'm going to struggle to lift significant weight over my head or to get back to dominating chin ups.

No wonder things were feeling beat up.

Don't get me wrong I don't look hugely fat but I sure as hell don't look like a fitness professional.

Man I was angry at myself at first. How did I let this happen? How did I not notice?

I'm 38 now, I'm not prepared to turn into some soft mushy middle aged chap who sighs everytime he sits down.

Fuck. That. Shit.

I'm on a 28 day mission.

I don't expect to be all ripped and running 10 miles for fun in 28 days. But I do expect to be in a damn sight better place than I am now.

I want to be moving without feeling like I'm going to break.

This is what I do day in day out for other people. Being busy is no longer an excuse for missing training. I'm booking my own session first and putting clients around me rather than the other way around.

After all who wants an out of shape trainer?

I'll do a post here each week with progress, you can help to keep me accountable.

That's it for today.

There's no big lessons or take home points for you. When I started this blog I intended to be completely honest in it.

No rainbows and unicorns farts.

Just the truth.