Shoulder Update and Training Ques

Went for a massage on Sunday and my shoulder feels so much better. No more pain when lifting my right arm overhead. But for safety measures, I am refraining myself from any kind of overhead presses until I am super confident that my shoulder is as good as new or as close to it as I can get.

What I can't refrain myself from doing any longer is training. So I trained squats the other day. Also did pushups (which I can do without any pain whatsoever) and TRX backrows (ditto). I think my squat technique is getting better. My previous trainer told me that I was more of a hamstring-dependent person (i.e. my posterior chain is stronger than my anterior chain).

I agree. And I also agree that I squat funny. Especially when trying to get up to the neutral position. I've always found it difficult to activate my quads for some reason that befuddles me. Until I bumped into these series of squat tutorial by Matt Wenning of Elite Fitness Systems.

The training que that I find most helpful in improving my squat technique was to look up. That way the body follows you in an upward direction rather than horizontal, than upwards... like I usually do. Okay I don't know how to describe my funny squat posture. But what you need to know here is that giving out the right coaching que helps a trainee immensely in improving technique and body-consciousness.

All in all there are 5 parts to this squats tutorial. I'm gonna just post the first one in this blog. The rest you can find in YouTube. Shouldn't be hard to find since it's titled "So You Think You Can Squat Part 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5. I believe my readers are smart enough.

Enjoy the vids! Hope you find it as helpful as I did.

Shoulder Injury Update

The good news is the shoulder feels better. The bad news is it's still not as good as new. Hence I am still not doing any exercise whatsoever. I will let my shoulder be subject to another massage session this Sunday.

In total my shoulder has been massaged twice, a week after the injury happened. My friend nagged me about it for ages. She told me I should not take any kind of shoulder tweak lightly and I should have gone for a massage immediately.

In my mind I thought I am still in my early 20s and have healing abilities of the likes of Wolverine. Apparently I was wrong.

Anyway, I noticed a funny thing during this involuntary resting period. I'm getting bigger and more defined. Clothes and pants are tight in all the right spots. Perhaps it is coincidental that it was about time I de-load? Maybe not. But whatever it is I like the effect.

Opinion

I'm pretty much a relative newbie to things health and fitness. But being a relative newbie doesn't mean that I can't form my own opinion. And my opinion is this:

For those who are absolute beginners, I would recommend mastering the two things first:

1. Bodyweight squats
2. Pushups

I believe these two exercises are the foundation of weight training.

Knowing the correct mechanics of bodyweight squats (ass back, not ass down) would serve you in good stead for future pursuits of weight training: barbell squats, deadlifting, heck... kettlebell swings even.

And there's a lot more to the humble pushup than meets the eye. Do you know that the pushup works your back muscles as well as your pecs? And it also activates your lats quite a bit. And of course, it also trains core strength.

Once you get decently good at these two moves I think it would be so much easier for you to learn other things.

Sharing

Setback

My right shoulder is tweaked somewhat. Even doing dumbbell presses with a mere 7kg (my warmup weight) feels uncomfortable. I'm not sure whether it was tweaked during one of my overhead press sessions or it was tweaked doing something innocent... like sleeping.

It feels better now. But still not back to normal. Funnily enough the shoulder feels better after a squats session. Probably the positioning of the shoulders to the bar has relieved the pain somewhat.

Doing pushups doesn't inflict pain on the shoulder though. So probably I'm gonna have to just settle for pushups and bodyweight rows and perhaps dumbbell floor presses for my upper body training sessions.

Hopefully my shoulder will recover very soon. I miss overhead presses already.