The Weak In Rock

When I started my fitness journey I made some progress and took a lot of wrong turns.  I started making consistent good moves and steady, sustained progress when I started reading Andrew Heffernan’s “Male Pattern Fitness” blog.  Andrew doesn’t write as often as he used to, but when he does, it’s nearly always gold.  His latest post is no exception:

A Six-Pack Won’t Fix Your Life

His point, and it’s one that I’ve tried to make here before, is that if you’re trying to solve a perceived “problem” with your body then your odds of success are pretty low.  Most people who work towards fitness goals and reach them then just fall off the wagon and go back to their old habits.  For me, I think I finally got my head in the right place when I realized I wasn’t working towards a goal weight or specific physical change and was, instead, permanently changing the course of my life.  And I’m all about see what I can accomplish and being impressed with myself, and then seeing what else I can do.

Andrew puts it better than I ever could:

Having fitness goals is great. Wanting to be better is great. Having ideals to aspire to is great. But when you become a size 6 or a six-packed dude, you’ll still be you–same problems, same hang-ups, same strengths and weaknesses. And sadly, if you’re someone who has hated his or her body because it’s too fat or too weak or too slow all your life, I suspect you’ll find a way to keep hating it.

Unless you find a way to approach fitness not as a fix for problems but as a practice, an exploration, and an affirmation of what you’re capable of rather than a way to discipline and fix and shape.

My heart absolutely goes out to anyone who is a chronic pain sufferer.  I tweaked my back in mid-May and have been enduring mild but persistent pain (and occasionally severe pain) ever since.  That’s a little less than three months of ouchies and I’m already going batshit.  If my doctor were to tell me today that I could expect to live with this pain for the rest of my life I’m relatively certain I’d develop a chemical dependency pretty quickly.

So, what’s going on, for those who care, is that I’ve got a disk out of alignment in my mid-thoracic spine - basically, right where my rib cage starts.  It originally presented as pain in my my lower lumbar region, but once I got sent to a physical therapist the exercises and stretches he gave me to relieve that pain revealed that the lower back pain was just compensatory pain due to the muscles of my left lower back being overworked due to their efforts to stabilize my spine.  So, what looked like a simple muscle strain has turned out to be more serious, and more difficult to fix.

As a result, I’m doing nothing - thus no postings about health and exercise.  Actually, being inactive is easily as frustrating as being in pain all the time.  I loves me some endorphins, and I’m not getting any, damn it. I can also feel my body getting weaker, which is really pissing me off.