Unity is strength

“A leader must inspire or his team will expire.” —Orrin Woodward

It is 3 o’clock in the morning, Sunday, and I’m speaking into my phone (voice to text) while I am laying in bed with a heating pad on my elbows. I’m supposed to heat them for fifteen minutes, massage the forearm, and stretch the flexor muscles, at least three to five times per day. As you know from previous posts, my elbows have been giving me trouble for a long time now, at least a year and a half. And consequently, I have not been able to spend long stretches sitting at a computer, researching and writing. I took two months off, and that didn’t help, so I figured out that rest was not the answer.

My right elbow started to crap out on me after I returned from Thailand in first part of 2023. I was doing yoga classes several times per week, and pull-ups at the YMCA, along with a plethora of other gym-related resistance training. Gabriel, my youngest son, was a big inspiration for me to be “fit” because I saw him growing muscles and looking fine. He’s a self-disciplined and smart young man, and he was giving advice to the whole family! After a trip to Ecuador with his dad, he got his dad going to the gym, and his brother pumping iron, too!

My son Gabriel at the gym with me

I wanted to both bond with my son, and age well. So during his junior and senior year of high school, we went to the gym together, a lot! I left him alone much of the time, as I didn’t want to embarrass him in front of his friends, but sometimes we ended up wearing matching shirts by accident and the other moms thought it was cute. He finally told me that his friends were joking with him about going to the gym with his mom, but in a good way. He’s at college now, and I miss him. I quit going to the YMCA for now, until I heal completely. When he’s home for break, maybe I’ll resume.

Now, in my early 50s, my body feels different. At 50, I felt like superwoman, but this year I’ve felt like I was hit by a mac truck. Anyway, to continue with my story, I was super proud of myself for doing pull ups at my age. Not many moms can do pulls ups at the gym, but I was cranking out ten at a time, up from zero the year before. I pushed myself until I really couldn’t exercise my upper body at all and ended up in physical therapy. But this didn’t stop me from working out, because if you know me, I’m like a race horse. Since I couldn’t work my upper body, I doubled up on my lower body and started trying to do the front splits, along with a bunch of machine work to strengthen and lengthen my leg muscles and ligaments.

As it turned out, I was also losing this little hormone called estrogen, which is fundamental in the structure of tendons and their recovery. Menopause is not in the head, and I didn’t fully appreciate how it was impacting my body. So while I was exercising a lot, and I thought that I was healthy and strong, I didn’t have enough recovery time between workout sessions, and this put tremendous stress on my sacroiliac ligaments. You may have remembered a post about pole dancing back then, since I was feeling rather invincible up until the point where I couldn’t even sleep on my side at night or cut onions on my countertop without pain in my elbows. I developed sciatica, too. And that’s no joke!

After two cortisone shots in my elbows, numerous doctors, physical and occupational therapy (each several different periods), and a plethora of imaging tests, I wasn’t any closer to healing. I felt like I had gone from being a strong little monkey, swinging on ropes in Thailand, to an old ape who couldn’t even sit or walk. It all happened rather suddenly, which was humbling to say the least. After I had exhausted all of my resources in the medical system, I started seeing these little ads come up on my social media feeds for free classes about lower back pain, and I signed up for one of them. This one was a seven day trial on how to recover. I then did another one, with a different teacher and approach.

It was during this period when I figured out what had happened to me. It wasn’t because I had some autoimmune disease or because I was somehow dying from menopause. I just wasn’t connected to my body very well. I now link my aggressive exercising, and bad posture-mechanics at the computer, to my pain, because none of it is natural. I had injured the tendons in my media epicondyle (tendons connect muscles to bones) and I had further exasperated them with repetitive stress being immobile and stiff at the computer. I had stretched the ligaments in my SI joint too far, which causes other muscles to tighten and cause sciatica. If I wasn’t researching and writing, then I was trading stocks all day.

Recently, I had an MRI of my SI joint and they didn’t find anything wrong, so this confirmed my hypothesis that I had injured myself. They found only minor issues in my lower back, so I continued implementing what I had learned in the free courses online about stabilizing my SI joint and rebalancing the muscles and ligaments in my pelvis, and I’m feeling much better than before. The sciatica is gone, and I can sleep on my side again, but I’m not totally there yet…still tightens on me but I can walk now on the sand without pain afterwards. I started occupational therapy for my elbows (both now, with the right being worse). But I’ve learned that immobilizing and resting just makes tendons deteriorate even more. And cortisone shots weaken tendons long-term.

I did more research and learned that tendons only heal with appropriate load. One of the worse things you can do for your tendons is not exercise them. So I started loading my elbow tendons too frequently and got worse, still not giving them enough time to heal. Then, I stumbled upon a dude by the name of Mark Rippetoe, and I decided to implement this strategy about a week ago. It is pretty much the opposite of conventional medical approaches that contradict research. I had heard him speaking in another podcast about pin firing race horses…the idea is to increase the inflammation rather than take it away. This caused me to question the whole idea of “inflammation” as the bad guy. Inflammation is actually good… it’s your body’s way of healing itself.

I told my occupational therapist that I didn’t want to do those patches anymore with steroid medication that reduces the inflammation. It seemed kind of counterproductive to massage the muscles to inflame them, and then put steroid patches on them to take away the inflammation. If you can explain to me the logic behind why they do this…please take the time to comment. It seems to me that modern-day people just don’t like pain, and don’t appreciate the process of inflammation in the healing process. So they label “inflammation” as bad and push anti-inflammatories to stop the body from healing, because it’s better not to feel pain than to heal. Huh? More backwards logic…but it doesn’t surprise me, and it shouldn’t surprise you. Most of my learning these days is unlearning.

I also decided to try something called DMSO (externally for now), and I put Shea butter with lemongrass on my elbows fairly often. Finally, I’m starting to see some real progress! My pain is different now…more like sore muscles healing. I can bend my right arm again and wash my hair without pain. I also found another guy online who talks about healing injuries through the kinetic chain. It makes sense because I am very sore in my shoulders and scapula, and everywhere in my atrophied upper body, after doing chin ups again. Actually, I can’t even do one chin up anymore. I have to stand on a box to reach my chin over the bar and then very slowly lower myself, as slow as possible. My arms shake. They call this eccentric loading, which is basically loading muscle while in lengthens.

The body of a human being is a lot like the body of society. For example, my elbows were likely injured because they were taking on more load than they are mechanically designed to do. If there is weakness in the rotator cuff, or the scapula, from not sitting correctly at the computer, and from sitting for long unnatural periods of time, then the elbow will pay the price further down the kinetic chain. The solution therefore involves tracing the kinetic chain back to the real culprit, to restore proper mechanics and function. It makes perfect sense when you look at system in its entirety, and not through its isolated parts. This is the problem with society…extreme left-brained activity, having lost touch with the right side, and the system as a whole.

So when I heard black men speaking out against Obama last week, I made another analogical connection. I have identified the real culprit in the kinetic chain of my body (my shoulders and upper back), and it appears society is becoming more enlightened about its kinetic chain, too. After I started doing eccentric chin ups, I felt very different. I realized that perhaps the dysfunction in my elbow, actually started in my shoulders and scapula, because I have poor posture sitting at the computer. The moral of the story is analogical thinking rocks. I have awoken to the wholeness of my body, and I think society is waking up and making some connections about their systemic problems too. 

In just a few more weeks, I hope to be a lot better. If Mark Rippetoe’s logical strategy works for me, then I should not have any pain in my elbows after the fifth session, and I just finished the second. And if the election works the way it should in a fair and just way, then I think the United States of America has a chance to heal and move better again. Our country is not exactly a young monkey, but I think there’s some good people behind that old man who can make a real difference. As we know, it takes a smart team of players to win a game. Running a country is no game, and there are no easy solutions to problems ahead, but a smart and capable team is a good start. That is Kennedy, Gabbard, and Trump.

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