This blog mostly stood as a place to chronicle all of the things I was doing while traveling so that I wouldn’t have to repeat full stories a billion times. Following my 2019 half year trip, I spent some time back in Ohio, where I wrote one more blog post. I then went on a month long road trip from Cleveland to Utah and then down to Texas. During that trip, I accepted a job in Austin, Texas and never wrote about the trip or any of the cool stuff I’ve done since I got down here. I’m not going to write posts about any of it, but my first tournament in Texas was played alongside an AVP main draw player as a random pickup and then Ryan and I trained with Beachbox Camps again in Cuba. Maybe I’ll try to get back to writing if we’re ever allowed to travel again, but I figured there were some things I’ve been meaning to write about and what better time then when we’re all trapped in our homes. I’m going to try to take a break from working out/working/playing video games to write one of these every so often now. In January, I got injured to the point where I couldn’t train for a while. It’s not the first time, but this time I have the past few years of learning about the human body and how to take care of myself in general. That is what this post is about.
If you’ve been reading these, you’ll know that I have slowly been switching my mindset from a brute who wills his way through things to a mindful human who does things with purpose so that I can continue to do them in the future. Don’t miss the word “slowly” there. Since moving to Austin, one of the things I picked up to make more friends was bouldering. My climbing skills are pretty sub par, but my brute brain is really good at firing all of my muscles to make me accomplish things. For those wondering, that is not the correct way to climb. On a particularly large reach, I caught my body weight almost entirely in my left shoulder and felt something shift in my my upper back. Needless to say, I’ve done a lot of dumb stuff and hurt myself. I’m pretty good at recovering, so I did the necessary stretches, iced and left it alone. Unlike usual, this pain didn’t go away and my range in shoulder and neck became limited.
If you know me at all, you’ll know most of my training is usually based around what I look like without a shirt on, so something like this wouldn’t keep me out of the gym. Nowadays, I’m a little more focused on the future of my body. I switched almost entirely to mobility work, strengthening my joints and tendons and working on flexibility. After a month or so, no luck from that healing factor. I got myself a physical therapist (who also has done work with the South African Olympic weightlifting team) and she got my shoulder fixed up in two sessions. Working with her, we found that some of the smaller muscles in my left shoulder were not firing. Through baseball, boxing and volleyball, my left arm has always been more precise, never bringing much in the way of power. Because of this, it never had to learn the correct movements for generating that power. A few additions to the morning routine later and I’m back in the sand, better than ever.
In a functional movement workshop I took during my time away from volleyball, I found tons of areas where I was weak or unstable or lacked mobility. Usually, these areas push us away, but by spending more time on them then the things that come easily, everything comes more easily. My hips are tight from lifting weights and sitting at a desk, but frequent attempts to work towards the splits have slowly maybe them one of my most mobile areas. The instructor of the workshop made a small comment at one point in the workshop, “Build a house to live in, not sell.”, which now seems in line with my newfound approach to my physical and mental state. I no longer care about what these things look like form the outside, physically or mentally, just that I feel more comfortable with them daily. As a result, I think the outward performance has actually come quite a bit easier than when that was my main focus.
Pulling Out The Weeds
In the book “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind”, Shunryu Suzuki mentions “Pulling out the weeds, we make nourishment of the plant.” This is in reference to the gardening technique of planting pulled weeds around a plant to give the plant more nutrients. Finding weaknesses in yourself, physical or mental, allow you to work through those things. Not only are you now more complete, but you understand how you got that way. My shoulder was not firing correctly, so now I start every day with some stretches and exercises to train my muscle memory for my shoulder to begin firing correctly. This technique has obvious physical benefits but it doesn’t stop there.
Everyone has different things from their past or from their genetics that function as triggers. Maybe certain topics or occurrences fill you with rage or depression. Practices, such as mindfulness, can help to alleviate these responses. Anger and sadness are not negative emotions, they are just emotions. That is an integral part to moving past certain things, to remove the judgement you feel towards them. If you can view certain responses without judgement as to if they are right or wrong, you can acknowledge why you feel that way or why you act a certain way. These things can be used to inform your decisions going forward or to understand why you react certain ways. You’d be surprised how easy life becomes when you just get out of your own way.
The Invitation
Our current world situation is forcing a lot of people to confront personal limitations that they have likely been using social interactions, hobbies and work for neglect for a long time. Rather than avoid those things by binging television or wallowing in sadness and ice cream, I invite you to spend some of this time to investigate those things. I’m not saying you shouldn’t do the aforementioned things, we all know I’m over here hoarding ice cream. But, now is the perfect excuse to work on things you’ve been putting off. Is your entire night thrown into disarray just by the thought of a certain topic? Try to sit with that thought and really think through why it causes you so much distress, without deeming your feelings as incorrect. Do your shoulders feel tight from sitting at your desk all day long or your hips are ablaze from simply crouching down? There are a ton of free routines/workouts from wonderful people on the internet to work on all of those things. You can even work on that stuff while you binge watch. Do you see people in movies doing things you envy like play music or paint? Take this time to royally suck at them. Use all of your quarantine time to suck at that thing until you accidentally get good at it. I’m currently doing this with piano, probably to my neighbors’ dismay. If you don’t know where to start with any of these things, feel free to reach out. I’ll do my best to point you in the right direction. My point is to leave this situation with more than you walked in with.
I am not telling anyone what to do because I think I know or am better. I am currently also trying to do all of these things. Some days of this quarantine, I’ve played video games for the duration of me being awake. But others, I’ve spent all day drawing or playing piano or really working on stretching my hips. While we’re all currently forced to spend a lot of continuous time with the mind and body we have, now just seems like the perfect circumstance to make it a better space to live in.