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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.

The shoulder is a naturally mobile joint.  For me and many others, range of motion in the shoulder is not an issue.  The challenge lies in creating enough inherent stability around that joint to keep it strong and pain-free during overhead moves such as the overhead squat.

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.

Dogs have it easy.  Cats do to for that matter.  Take this guy for example.  I just watched him spend his entire afternoon getting weird on catnip and cleaning himself with zeal.

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.

New skin is innocent.  It’s vulnerable and naive to the threats which thrust it into existence.  For this reason many athletes have trouble breaking the cycle of broken/soft skin and getting their hands to harden up in a timely manner to return to competition.  The only way to throw this rose pedal soft epidermis into the wood chipper of your life is to let it know:  “Welcome to the world.  It is salty and awful out here.”I’ve devoted the past week and a half to testing the commonly held gymnastics theory that soaking a torn callus in a super-saturated salt mixture 3x/ day makes the skin grow back with the callus already in place.  Calluses typically form as the result of physical irritation but this theory employs a chemical irritation to reach the same result.

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.

I’m realizing that I’m in an abusive relationship with my skin.  We’ve had some rough times.  We’re hot and cold.  Our families do not approve.  We’re back together right now.  We’re a passionate, fiery duo but we’re meant for each other so we’re making changes and making it work.  I left town with guns blazing and the wind in my hair but recently came crawling back with with benzoin tincture in my hands and a promise on my lips.  “I’m a changed man.”  Me and my skin, we’re going to make it this time.  This time is going to be different. . .

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.

Here’s how I tape my hands.  My previous technique was the one where you split the tape and run it between your fingers.  For me, this works much, much better.  I went straight from this video to a nasty KB/ pull up wod.  This heavy kb/ pull up combo usually opens my hands up.  I got through today without a blister.