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Sports medicine is all about time.  Anyone can get you back onto the field eventually.  The person that can shave days or weeks from your recovery time is a sports medicine doctor.  A recent addition to our clinic that is saving our patients days and weeks is the NormaTec MVP Pro.

We hold our standards to those of the elite sports medicine clinics, and this is what is now being done for our nation’s olympians and pros.   We are now able to push rehab harder and faster than before with the benefit of draining and decompressing the injured area after a demanding rehab session.  The NormaTec works by manipulating your body’s circulatory system to reduce local inflammation and increase oxygen uptake in an injured tissue.

Venous return is a passive process.  Your heart and arteries are big muscular vessels that actively push oxygen rich blood to your tissues.  You veins are not quite so yoked and are dependent upon external pressures from your muscles to push the fluid through a system of one way valves.  External compression makes this venous return system more efficient.

If your upstream organs such as the brain are dependent upon active muscular contraction for blood supply what happens when you stand with your knees locked in one spot for a half hour or more?  Hilarious wedding montage videos happen that’s what.

NormaTec vasopneumatic compression facilitates rapid venous return with a patented pulsing compression system.  This speeds venous return accelerating the recovery and healing process.

Athletes such as LeBron James, Kevin Garnett and others are now spending the half-time break of their games plugged into the same NormaTec unit that we provide for our patients here at Sports Medicine Northwest.  We’ll keep holding the standard high over here.  As always, if it’s good enough for Mark Wahlberg, it’s good enough for us.

KB Banded Barbell OHS-
Yep.  I said it.
This is a great warm-up move because of its sports specificity and the fact that it challenges range of motion with stability.

Are you going to earn some sideways looks when you are strapping kbs and bands to the bar?  Yeah.  Yeah you are.  You can just shrug that off with your nice, stable shoulders.

AC Milan:  wasted youth.

This wantonly indulgent behavior isn’t even what I envy.  Where they have it good is with big bags of nutrition simply labeled “CAT FOOD.”  If AC Milan here needs to bump up his caloric intake to recover from doing 7 minutes of burpees or some cat equivalent, he hits the food bowl twice.  Easy.  I want that.  If you know where I can get huge bags of balanced nutrition labeled “Man Food’ please send me that link.  Until then, there is Viking Hash:

Behold.

1) 4 large sweet potatoes cubed
2) 1 yellow Onion
3) 1 shallot
4) 4 cloves garlic
Get the biggest wok you can find  good and hot and add items 1-4 with some butter (optional)

Cook the following items separately and add them as they are ready.

1.5 lbs. ground Turkey lightly salted
One Pack of bacon  (Bake in the oven, pour the grease into the potato/onion wok, chop into bits and add)
2 chopped turkey dogs (They were in the fridge so. . . )
1/2 lbs. ground beef
1.5 lbs. pulled pork shoulder  (6 hours in the slow cooker.  Add at the end.)

LOTS of olive oil

1 head of broccoli (rubbed with olive oil, salt & pepper then oven roasted @ 400 for 9 minutes)
16 brussels sprouts (ditto)

A fist full of spinach at the end.

If you’re looking for caloric density, add all of the bacon and turkey grease and top it with an avocado and more olive oil.  I wish I could just toss a big bag of this stuff over my shoulder and eat it from a shiny metal bowl on my kitchen floor.

You may never know the occult pleasures of getting wacked out of your gourd on catnip and cleaning your entire body with a coarse tongue but you CAN have this.  Person food.  Enjoy.

Right Hand (Experimental Group) day One: The Salt Soak Group

Left Hand (Control Group) day One : The Neosporin Group

I’ve been diligently salt soaking my right ring finger in super saturated salt water for over a week now.  I soak the right hand 3x/day for 20 minute spells.  This is easy to do.  I simply walk about handling my business while carrying a mug of salt water that I have my right middle finger submerged in.  I look like an unhygienic waiter.  Due to inherent base line of salinity in the body, the salt soak has only a minimal burn.

RESULTS:

Just look at that hardened digit on the right! Tell me that scaly talon isn’t ready for ropes.

In the interests of full disclosure, I will admit that I contaminated these results. I gave up on the Neosporin and started salting both hands a few days ago. I made the early switch when the skin on The Experimental Group was healing tough, dry and resilient as opposed to the goopy mess of flesh which often opened and bled on the Neosporin hand.

1. Cracking- The wound dries out quickly and is susceptible to cracking. For this reason, I recommend applying an unflavored chap stick to the tear a couple times per day and before workouts.
2. Convenience- My walking mug trick worked for me, but this technique is intended for torn calluses in the palm of the hand as well. Unless you are a security guard at a junior college, you probably don’t have the time to sit with the palms of your hands in two saucers of salt water for an hour every day.

Saturday Squall is when my coach pairs me off against a man who is a friend, an in-house rival, and a notorious chauvinistic womanizer.  Squall for us is a a head-to-head competition designed to turn our enormous egos into fuel.  It keeps us sharp.  No one can mentally terrorize us like we can to each other.  He has a habit of innocently asking me “how old are you?” before we compete.  Out of respect for his chauvinistic privacy, I will refer to him as Shmryan “Shmollywood” Shmandrews. We have a well established rivalry where he wins some, and I look really muscular with my shirt off in others.  Anyway, this past Saturday me and my fresh, unblemished skin walked into squall that turned out to be a hand tear buzzsaw:

SQUALL #2
75 DU’s
hand stand walk across gym
30 power snatches
“all good thus far”
3 rounds of 10 chest to bar pull-ups/ 12 wallballs
“C2B’s can be tough but my super-amazing gymnast tape job holds up great and my baby soft skin is still intact.”
3 Rope Climbs
“Dang.”

3 rope climbs isn’t really a problem. I did 11 touch and go last week, but after those C2B’s and the rushed tempo of no recovery between climbs, the three rope climbs became “a problem.”

I’d typically tape my legs, my shoes, my face, etc. for this sort of wod but the events were announced just before we began and I foolishly dove right into it rather than slow down the momentum of the moment for my adhesive ritual.

I had a fast tempo going with butterfly chest to bar pull-ups that gave me a big lead on Shmryan heading into the final 3 climbs but he is very tan and he was gaining on me fast.  The first guy to touch the ceiling on the 3rd climb would win this squall.

I took off on the 3rd climb before he did.  I had to.  He is quite tan after all and a fast climber.  I began that climb with enough energy in the tank to make it to the top but not quite enough to make a controlled descent back down.  The result:

I get to the top before Shmryan does and reach for the ceiling and my hard earned victory.  I miss- I miss a freaking wall!  I fall part of the way back down the rope.  His small strong hands and leathery skin are nipping at my heels.  I struggle back up to the top, take another desperate grab at the ceiling and promtly fall 17′ to the ground, leaving a good amount of arm, leg, and hand skin on the rope.  I’m not sure if I even touched the ceiling but the judges gave it to me.  For the moment my burning lungs and gaping flesh command my attention.  Squall #1 ended with a controversial missed rep by Mr. Shmandrews and my victory.  Squall #2 ended with an equally murky conclusion.  Until next time my mute, hairless, leathery friend.

That night I went to Foundations Crossfit’s holiday party and got some interesting hand recovery advice from trainer Adam Wenzel.  Apparently, it is a commonly held belief in the gymnastics community that soaking hand tears in super-saturated salt water causes the skin to grow back strong and with the callus already in place.  I had several nasty tears available to test this theory and that’s how I’ve spent the last few days.  I chose the right hand as the salt dip hand and the left hand as the traditional neosporin/soap and water control hand.  The right hand had the bigger and deeper tear so if it healed better than the left, this salt soak concept would be validated.

PICS!
Here’s a pic of the poor digits immediatly after I removed the bandages when I got home on Saturday.

This poor bastard is my right hand.  This is The Experimental Group= salt soak 3x/day

left middle finger:  the smaller tear of the two.  I will refer to it as The Control Group=  neosporin+soap and water This salt soak concept comes from Coach Sommer of Gymnasitic Bodies .  It works like this: Step 1) Make a super-saturated salt mix Fill a small glass of warm water with so much salt that it no longer dissolves and their  is a small pile of undisolved salt in the bottom of the glass. Step 2)   Put your ripped finger into that glass and keep it there for 10-20 minutes. Repeat 3 times per day

24 hours later.  Sunday, Day 2.  This photo is taken immediately after a 20 minute salt soak on The Experimental Group which is the miraculously normal looking digit on the right.

This guy can relate too.  If he had the for site to  read this blog before traveling back in time, he may  have  kept his flawless Futrure-Austrian skin intact as well as saving the planet from a robo-apocalypse.

The fact is that I rip my hands for a combination of reasons:

• Paper flesh/ futuristic cyborg strength etc. as described above
• Technique- I should let the bell skip to my proximal interphalangeal joint in the bottom of the swing, but I get all excited in competition and hold too tight.
• My taping techniques have all failed me.  In the photo beneath, the tape that I used was little more than bloody streamers by the mid-way point of the event.  I learned how to make a gymnastics grip from tape that is legal in all kb/crossfit events.  It will be the subject of my next post.  This post is about what I’ve done to harden up my hands.

Example:

Attempt #1 at The Lab

One workout that tore me up pretty badly was in an IKFF competition at The Lab a few months back.  It was a 5 minute demolition derby of #53 kettlebell snatch with unlimited hand switches.  I got 118 reps and the stigmata pictured on the left.

War wounds like these are cute for a minute.  They make nice FB profile updates, but it gets old pretty quick and I’m always on the lookout for a new technique that will keep my skin on my hands where it belongs.

I put two new techniques to the test this weekend at the Oregon Crossfit Winter Games.  Keep an eye on the Old Country Iron Club blog for a full write-up.  I hear it will be posted on Wednesday.

This turned out to be a perfect opportunity to compare the results as it turned out by random chance that event #1 at the OCFWG was the exact same event that opened my hands up just 3 months ago at The Lab.  The only difference was that this time the snatches were preceded by a 2k row and 60 seconds of rest.  Gross.

More Lab grossness

The intervention:

Boom!  This flawless future-Austrian skin is alive and well.

Where does the bear end and the Burt Reynolds begin?

It’s not just fashion.  Brazilian wax has nothing to do with the fact that men just aren’t this hairy anymore.  It is a well documented fact that testosterone levels in American males have been on steady decline over the past 40 years. (1)  Gail and Laughlin demonstrated in a 2008 prospective, population-based study of 794 men that  Testosterone insufficiency in older men is associated with increased mortality independent of risk factors and co-existing conditions. (2)

As a tribute to our fury brethren of the 70’s, and to baseball players of the 90’s (and perhaps as a way to compensate for the fact that I was the last guy in my middle school to grow a mustache), I devoted last month to naturally raising my testosterone levels with over the counter nutraceuticals provided by my friend and colleague, Dr. Christopher Merlino.

The Plan:
I- Establish my baseline free Testosterone levels with a blood draw.  (After which draw he warned me that this experiment was likely going to fail.)

II-  Take whatever supplementation Chris threw at me over a 40 day span to move those numbers.

III-  Re-test the T numbers after 40 days.

Merlino went with a concoction of following:

• DHEA at a 3x physiologic dose
• American Ginseng
• D-Ribose
• Co- Q10

His goal was to enhance pathways and provide the body with pre-coursers that result in testosterone production. As is illustrated in the Testosterone Pathway chart below, it is reasonable to expect increased exogenous DHEA to drive a deficient testosterone pathway.

Results:
After 40 days of supplementation we re-checked my numbers:  My free Testosterone  levels came in at a whopping 779. 

According to a study by Vermeulen et al published in journal of clinical endocrinology and metabolism, normal total testosterone in healthy men are:  Age 25-34 , average 616.

 This would have been enough to send the mustacheless masses of the Seattle area knocking down Dr. Merlino’s door had my baseline number not also been 779. 
Before 779/After 779= Net Change of 0.
As it was, my little experiment likely drove higher estrogen levels in my system as the testosterone wasn’t able to go any higher.  Let this experience be a warning to you:

Disclaimer- Always track the results of new supplementation under medical supervision or risk inadvertently and ironically raising your estrogen levels.

Conclusion: 
 It would appear that my diet and lifestyle (lifting heavy things and eating meat) spike my T levels just about as high as they are able to go.  Either that or my high T levels compel me to lift heavy things and eat meat. . .