First of all thanks so much for all of the private emails wishing me luck on my shoulder surgery I discussed in my last post. Not sure why the comments aren’t working on the blogs but email works too 🙂

Wanted to provide a quick update and share some pointers for others who may have a surgery like this coming up soon. So the surgery went well, no issues and good clean repairs. I was amazed at the range of motion I had the very next day in physical therapy By week 4 I had almost full range of motion and was ready to start strength training however, my awesome surgeon, Dr. Gary Waslewski, gave me strict instructions – passive movements only for 6 weeks (passive is when someone else is moving my arm, I don’t get to use muscles for anything). He said to me “the goal isn’t speedy recovery, it’s lasting recovery” and that really stuck with me. Some of my co-workers who know what a fitness nut I am actually had a pool on how long it would take me to re-injure it during re-hab 🙂

So at 6 weeks I started strength training and I’m well on m way to 100%. Nothing hurts and the strength is coming back wicked fast. Now I wanted to share a bit about why I think this is. It’s a combination of a lot of things I’ve written about before (see my last post) as well as something known as pre-hab; that’s right re-hab that you do before surgery. Here’s a pretty good blog on exercises to bone up on prior to surgery. I can tell you I did all of them plus lots of cable work with laterals, cross raise, front raise, rotator cuff work, etc. Also focusing on cardio is key, you need to have a strong cardio base for your body to properly recover from anything – a hard workout, being sick or having surgery.

And, finally, one thing I didn’t read about but I did and I think it made a big difference. The last time I had shoulder surgery I remember the Doc telling me “Yeah, I had to cut through a lot of muscle so expect some extended recovery time wrt strength.” So this time at about 4 weeks before surgery I stopped all heavy lifting and did nothing but the pre-hab stuff mentioned earlier as well as a bunch of misc recovery type exercises with resistance bands and 5lb dumbbells (not a typo, yes, 5lbs). I dropped 15 pounds, pretty much all upper body muscle and I’m thinking that was a really good idea as it gave him much less muscle to deal with, all if it lean and high quality. I’m only about 5 pounds short of putting it all back on now as well!