Week 4 update

I continue to remain ahead of the average recovery time. The therapist is being safely aggressive; listening to my body, but always pushing me more.

Now that I'm about a month post-surgery, here are some highlight from week 4:

-All week I was weaning myself off the sling, and I'm now not using it at all, during the day. I only wear it at night, but not to hold up my arm, rather more as a safety net to prevent something stupid from happening.
-Washing, changing, eating continue to get easier. I'm now able to feed myself with my right hand again (surgically repaired side).
-Three new exercises at the start of week 5: Overhead pulleys (it's easy to rig this up yourself w/a quick hardware store trip, or you can just buy a set), forearm wall slides (link is to a great website talking about the usefulness of this activity for anyone doing overhead sports like Ultimate, baseball, and tennis), and hands-behind head scapular retraction. I do this last one laying down, like I'm in the start of a sit up position. In addition to squeezing my shoulder blades together, I am also trying to force my elbows down/in towards my sides. I've got a lot of stiffness in my shoulder and my elbow on all of my exercises stays bowed out because of this stiffness. The new form of scapular retraction is meant to combat this.

Overhead front pulleys

Forearm wall slides (usually done w/both arms parallel)
See video link!

Supine scapular retraction

I'm continuing my lower body & left arm workouts, but it's a little harder to keep up with now that all the shoulder exercises are mounting. It's important to mention how tiring this process is. I woke up from surgery having a repaired shoulder that *will be* better than it was. The problem is getting there. It is an incredible amount of work and very tiring going through all the therapy, even for a serious athlete, like myself. My therapist really put it in perspective for me: Not only am I recovering from the procedure, and the weeks of inactivity in the sling, but I'm also trying to now reprogram my shoulder to use normal mechanisms. For years, before the surgery my body had been compensating for the tears by altering the standard physiological motions, and now, with the new shoulder, I can hit the reset button.