12 Dec LCS and the hernia update
Hernia
8 years ago I remember looking in the mirror and asking my wife if my belly button looked funny. She commented that it looked large but that I’d always had a rather pronounced outie, so I didn’t think much of it. I kept looking at it though and started messing around with it. I found I could push it back in and when I did I felt a hole. It would then push itself back out and breathing could definitely make it larger. A full belly made it look even worse.
Finally I decided that a trip to the doctor was in order and my general practitioner confirmed my thoughts. It was an umbilical hernia. She referred me over to a surgeon and a couple days later I met with him. I lightened up training while all this was going on just to be safe. The surgeon, thankfully, was not worried. He said I’d need to get it fixed eventually. I played it off and since it never bothered me I kept going with training. It progressively looked worse and got bigger but never effected anything. Never any pain but it did remain in the back of my mind.
After discussing it with my doc, he decided to do a mesh via laprascopic surgery. The other option of just repairing the belly button and holding it with stitches would probably not be enough in my case, at least not with wanting to continue lifting. Date was set and it sounded like surgery would only take about an hour. In and out procedure.
Everything went well and zero complications.
I’m 3 weeks post op today. It’s the strangest feeling to have to scale back and nothing feel wrong. I’ve been injured before and had to take time off and/or work around it. This is different. Knowing that if I move too fast, I’ll aggravate something and potentially make things much worse, it’s tough to go slow when you feel so good.
The first couple days post op was tough. Pain was constant but exacerbated by movement. Sleeping was tough since I’m not a back sleeper. Rolling onto my side hurt and laying on my side hurt. Pain was awful but enough to make movement slow. As the days went by then it was just a waiting game and being patient to let everything internally heal.
My tentative plan is as follows:
Week 1 – Not a damn thing. I spent most of the time in bed or on the couch. I had the opportunity to have this week over thanksgiving holiday. Took the whole week off from work and just laid around. When I did get up it was short lived. By the end of the week I was moving around pretty easily but quickly getting tired.
Week 2 – Back to work. Still no training and no lifting. I didn’t lift a weight or a bar. I set it up so that clients would do most of the work or we avoided instances where I’d have to do something. In a couple special cases I was able to rely on my group of powerlifters to spot or load for specific clients. It’s a big help having a support structure to fall back on.
Week 3 – Light weight/bodyweight movements. This week I added in 3 full body workouts with the emphasis on bodyweight movements. If I did use weights, they were only dumbells and the total weight used was 45lbs or less. I incorporated a few static ab movements but only for very brief periods of time (15sec or less). These sessions were short and concise. Very little rest time but deliberately slow and controlled movements. These sessions left me tired and mildly sore. No pain.
Week 4 – The plan here is to work up to some empty bar movement, increase volume, and increase ab work. Still incredibly controlled and methodical with both movements and rest periods. I’m not in any hurry and have no plans to compete any time soon so this’ll allow me to focus on a couple technique issues and work out some kinks I’ve developed in the past year.
Week 5 – I’ll start to work up in the main movements to potentially as much as 135lbs. I won’t go any heavier than this. I’ve already set this limit knowing that I could still be potentially healing and to test the waters a bit as I get back into it. 3-4 sessions with higher volume and concentrating on utilizing the abs. I can tell they don’t work as much as they used to, so it’ll take some time to get them performing up to par again.
Week 6 – This week of Christmas and New Years. I plan to take this whole week off. One last down week before getting back to normal.
Week 7 and beyond – Here I plan to start a slow work up getting back up to potentially 50% and incrementing 5-10% every week. Sticking with high volume for a few more weeks and looking at this time as a pre-offseason time. At the end of January I will transition into a formal off season training block and look to compete sometime later in the year.
I’ve been very happy with how I’m feeling and the difficulty in all this that I feel fantastic but not being able to train. I’m used to taking time off when things hurt or during a deload when I feel beat to shit. This is tough. Feeling so good but not being able to take advantage of it. Got to be patient but yet, persistent. I do not want to have to go through this again. For a host of reason, the biggest being that I just don’t like taking time off.
Low Country Strength
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