dirt » Training

“Ice and Stretch”

Terry — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 03:33:14 +0000

I hurt myself on Friday, running to first base in a playoff game that was already over; my feeble ground ball to the third basemen would be the final out. In typical johnny-hustle like fashion, however, I made sure to run it out, pulling my hamstring in the process. Needless to say, I won’t be running for a while.

I’ve been injured before. This isn’t the first time, and it won’t be the last. I was the player on my college baseball team who was in the training room an hour before and an hour after each practice and game. I had figured out how to ice every part of my body effectively. I have pulled my groin, quads, and hamstrings. I’ve torn a muscle, I’ve ripped up my shoulder in multiple ways, and it’s a miracle my elbow even works. Cuts and bruises were just part of the uniform, as far as I was concerned. I even suffered an injury IN the training room. So, when I pulled up lame on my way to first base Friday, I knew that most of my fall plans, such as riding my bike to the library, running a 5k, and dropping those pesky ten pounds of Jersey Giant subs I’ve been eating this month, were going to be pushed back. I also knew that a lot of the gains I’ve made as far as strength is concerned over the past year will be gone. Getting injured can be mean starting over in many ways. Regaining those steps takes time, and comes in stages.

The first is adjusting to your new situation. Everyday activities become enormous obstacles: everything that is second nature to you becomes nearly impossible. Did you just drop something? Well, that wouldn’t have been a big deal Thursday, but it’s Saturday now, and you’ve pulled your hamstring. You can’t bend over. Good luck with that. When I had shoulder surgery, getting dressed was one of the most frustrating moments of my day. Currently, putting on pants is a struggle. You can understand how that might be a problem.

Once you start to gain a bit of functionality, the issue stops being adapting, and becomes relearning. You have to relearn how to use your muscles again. Strengthen them. Work them out. Build up the flexibility. Start walking. Then jogging. Then running. For a more serious injury, this could take quite a while. For example, when I partially tore my hamstring in high school, it took almost a year for me to get full strength back, and I never regained the speed I had in high school (I did get my flexibility back…see photo above). My current injury shouldn’t take nearly that long; I anticipate a month of rehab and I’ll be back to normal. Provided I do what I’m told.

This is the hardest part for me when it comes to recovery: Patience. I constantly want to push it to see if I can do a little more, or just “test it out” on the track or the bike. This weekend I went the pool and did some walking around in it. When I mentioned it to a physical therapist, she made a face that looked she’d just swallowed a lemon. “Ice and stretch,” she said. “That’s all you do this week. Doing anything else is just like picking at a scab”. But that’s the most difficult thing for me. I’m an active guy. I want to be moving around, doing things. I at least want to know that I can go to the gym if I want to. At the moment, I can’t, and that bothers me to no end. This gets even more dangerous as I gradually get better: the more functional I become, the more anxious I am to try more things.

I am actually hoping that I will get linked up with some physical therapy. It helps to have a trained professional tell me that, no, I’m not ready to start training for a 5K, but yes, I can tack on additional weight to my hamstring curls. Also, I enjoy the repetition, it helps me get back in the groove of going to the gym regularly, so I can hit the ground running (or slowly jogging) once therapy is over. In the long run, these injuries only serve to make a stronger person. Adversity leads to a need to work harder. I learn more about my body, what its strengths and limitations are, and more about myself: what am I willing to take? What am I willing to give to recovering? How bad do I want to be back on the field next season?

I can assure of this, I want to be back pretty badly.

Which means you can catch me at home, icing and stretching.

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Hitting my Off Season Goals: The Workout and Diet

Terry — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:14:18 +0000

At the end of the summer, I set some fitness goals for myself regarding baseball. I realized a good deal about my body during the baseball season:things I still could do and things I couldn’t do anymore, and things I was sure I could get better at. I realized throughout the season that I had lost some elements of my game that I had once had. Although I still have a pretty quick and aggressive bat, and can make good contact, the power I had in college was gone. I also realized that I am even slower than I was then. I also was getting a lot of soreness in my hips and knees, where I have never had pain before. Over the past month I have started a workout regimen that I hope will bring those elements back, and, possibly, improve on them as well.

The nice thing about baseball is you don’t necessarily have to be fast in order to be a good baserunner: you have to be smart, understand your own limitations, and have good technique rounding the bases and sliding. Those have always been strengths of mine; speed not so much. You can also get extra base hits without being fast: you just need to hit the ball further. So, I’ve decided to focus more on power than speed, since it will get me more bang for my buck. My workout plan also includes a good deal of knee and hip strengthening exercises, in order to avoid the joint pain I was experiencing during the season. This will also help with increasing speed and endurance. As for cardio, I will work primarily on interval trainining, meaning sprints mixed with jogging. This mimics baseball-like activity (which is a lot of stand-and-go, unlike basketball or soccer which is constant movement). This will also help to shed some of those extra pounds, which don’t help the knees either.

The main part of the workout plan is focused on lifting for power. I am using a program from Men’s Health called the Power Training Program (yes, I bought the book. No, I will not have arms like that). The program was designed by Robert Dos Remedios (@robertdos), who does College Athletic Strength Training. What I like about the program is that it focuses on gaining power. This means that there is a focus on quick movement exercises such as snatches and pulls, where you move a lot of weight quickly. Also, there is an emphasis on areas where power is generated from: your core, hips, and knees. As mentioned before, these are all areas that I need strengthening in anyway, so the program is perfectly tailored for what I’m trying to accomplish. It also focuses on “real world” movements, so no machines that isolate one body part. Each exercise works a number of muscle groups and mimics movements that occur during a game. I have been doing it for about three weeks now, and already my knees feel stronger and my weights are increasing.

The final element of any good workout plan is diet. The fact remains that if you eat garbage while working out, you won’t make any gains. And if your goal is to make gains in athletic performance, a crummy diet won’t help either. I have always been up and down in regards to diet. Eating to stay in shape is one thing; I have a high metabolic rate so I don’t pack on pounds quickly. But when I’m exercising for athletic performance, making sure I’m getting the right amount of carbs, protein, fat, etc. is critical to making gains in strength and power. My body needs to be properly fueled in order to do the type of workouts that I’m doing.

So, I’ve gone technical, through the discovery of Daily Burn. Daily Burn is the closest there is to a social media online nutrition and exercise program. I can track the food I eat, it breaks it up into the various categories, allows me to set nutritional goals, weight goals, and so on. I also can input my workouts, so I can track progress on weights and so on.

The nice thing about about Daily Burn are the iPhone Apps (You all new it was going to go in this direction). This allows me to input nutritional data on the fly (including an app that allows you to scan barcodes and directly recognize what you’re eating), and see how many more carbs I need to eat to meet my goals. It also allows me to program all my exercises for each workout, so that I can keep track of what I’m going to be doing each trip to the gym. This is extremely helpful, as I tend to skip out on sets, reps, or exercises because I’m tired. If they’re written down, it makes it more evident to me that I’m cheating myself, which makes me less likely to skip out. I would recommend Daily Burn to anyone who is interested. It makes the whole process a little more enjoyable, since you can see your progress. If you join, look up my profile and we can push each other.

Hopefully, this program will result in a more powerful baseball season next year. It certainly has helped to keep me in the gym, and has provided a good deal of new exercises and physical challenges that I haven’t dealt with in a while, and I’m learning things about what my body can and can’t do. Having specific goals make working out much more enjoyable…I have found that I am much more motivated to get to the gym since I know that I am trying to meet certain objectives.

Any tips or suggestions? What are you doing to keep fit?

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