Am I on track?

Am I on track?

Tuesday 12 July 2011

Next milestone in my shoulder rehab...

Headed along today for my monthly check-in with the physiotherapist – Janelle from HandsOn Therapy. She has been looking after and managing my shoulder recovery, after my surgeon released me into her care.


Good news today was – I don’t have to see her anymore!! Janelle was happy with how the shoulder is progressing, both with range of movement and rebuilding strength.

Now, the only rehab professional left is Leonie, my Exercise Physiologist (who works in the same practice as Janelle). Leonie will be continuing to supervise and adjust my gym-based shoulder rehab every week, although at the last visit, she said I’d probably only need to see her a few more times at the most. From there, I’ll be ‘on my own’ doing a set weights routine in the gym.

I’m actually really enjoying my gym-based shoulder rehab. As silly as it sounds – it feels more like a ‘manly’ thing to do as opposed to using the elastic therabands. Clearly, it pushes the buttons in the prehistoric grunty man-part of my brain…

To give you an idea of the sort of ‘shoulder training’ I’m doing – here are the basic exercises Leonie has me doing in the gym:

Warm up with ‘straight arm pulldowns’ (both front and side’ using a cable pin-weights machine.


Then using the cable chest press machine; doing ‘lat pull downs’ and ‘seated rows’ on the “hi/lo” cable machine; using dumb-bells to do front raises, shoulder press, and twisting bicep curls; and doing some ‘functional lifting’ exercises, bringing dumb-bells up from the floor to both shoulder and head height.

After all that, I’m usually pretty exhausted (at least, my shoulders, arms & chest are!!). My shoulder already feels a lot more ‘solid’ and strong after only a couple of months of this routine. Maybe I’ll need to upgrade my bike stem and handlebars to the Pro Vibe Cavendish or Thor Hushovd editions to handle my new found strength!! ;)

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