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Physical Fitness

Mar 18, 2023

Talk to your doctor before beginning to exercise. Let me repeat that: talk to your doctor before beginning to exercise. If you jump in to serious exercise, it is possible that you'll injure yourself. You might have a pre-existing issue that you're not aware of. See my experience with injury below.

“Those who do not find time for exercise now will have to find time for illness.” -The Earl of Derby, 1873

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Gymnastics Rings

Gymnastics Rings Exercises

Gymnastics Rings Injury

In the summer of 2023, I bought some gymnastics rings and hung them in my basement. (They’re a lot of fun. Mira and her toddler friends love playing on them.) However, after several months of working on them I began to develop persistent shoulder pain in my right shoulder. It would be triggered even on non-work-out days and last throughout the day. The only thing that seemed to help was extensive stretching and warm-up in the morning. Eventually, I had to stop working out on the rings. The pain persisted, even once I stopped working out.

I went to a chiropractor, who told me that I’d injured my rotator cuff.
This is a complex of muscles that allows the shoulder to rotate in a bunch of directions. We figured out that I had damaged my supraspinatus and teres minor muscles. My supraspinatus was previously injured due to wearing a heavy single-shoulder bag for many years.

These muscles had gone from doing essentially no work to stabilizing my body weight. It was a massive jump in stress on them. I hadn’t thought through what I was doing, and didn’t know why my shoulder hurt so much. So, I found myself in a position where I had to talk to a chiropractor about my shoulder.

The chiropractor prescribed some specific physiotherapy exercises, and they helped a great deal. The right shoulder now feels fine most of the time, and the injuries are healing. It looks like I’ll be able to resume something like normal workouts in a few months.

Lesson: if I’d talked to a doctor or chiropractor before playing with the rings, I would have saved myself a lot of time and pain.

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