Injury Advice: Knees/Shoulder/Elbows

Hi there

Thank you for dropping by, this is gonna be a long one. First, I want to share that I have been going to a physician (3 different) for the past 1½ year almost weekly. I have not come closer to the goal to be injuryless - which is why I in desperation seek advice on this board. I have not felt my doctor(s) took this serious, so I hope this gathering will.

I will try to summarize all that is “wrong” with me and my physic doings because I am suspecting a connection. You decide.

I started off as child with gymnastics, only for a year as very young beofre I started swimming for 4 years until the age of 7. From here I started playing soccer (yes, that is a real sport in Europe). It became very serious until the age of around 15 where I quit. This history is just to share that I have always been very active.

Injury 1) At 15 I started training in a gym (as most that age without any knowledge and mostly just fitness training). I got sick of it and started Wing Tsun which caught my immediate interest. Though somehow I here caught my first injury. I had lower back pain. Most of the time it is not real pain, but more like I am a bit more inflexible in the lower left part of the back, like it is tighter. But every, say 4 months or so. I get this cutting feeling like a nerve is ripped over, the lasts for a couple of minutes, the I am rather sore the next week. I have also tried the very same feeling provoked by hanging from a bar with arms stretched doing a chinup. When lying still I can feel the irritation.

Quitting Wing Tsun and taking up training again age around 18 I got a bit more structured. Nothing with diets, but more freguent training to keep in shape.

Injury 2) At 20 I focused even more on my training. It got to a place where I ran a couple of days a week, was swimming a couple of days a week, and did a fullbody-program 2-3 times a week. I felt I had the right progression, but my knees broke down. It is mostly on the inside of the knee when I feel the pain, but it is very diffuse. I quit the running and the squatting and when to a physician after a while. First I got some acupunture, the we tried rebuilding my strength running first 2 mins, 2 mins brake and so on (very low intensity). We came to a point with no pains when active, but I still had “resting pains”. Now it was not only in my Knee, but I felt it in my quad and in my hamstrings and was just sore in the muscles all together, even when having breaks from the program. I got soles from my physician, but that didn’t help even though I still use them.

Injury 3,4,5) At 21, with knee problems I spent most time swimming and doing some upperbody exercises trying to keep myself in shape. Some day I felt some tension in my left elbow on the inside (the term golf elbow came in mind). First I tried to ignore it, but decided to give it a break. IN the brake period suddenly my shoulders started to burn. I mean, really burn, and became hard to move. OVer the weekend this went by, and now I had resting pains in my elbows (now both) and in both of my shoulders. Over the year I also felt the irritation in my shoulderblades. And somehow my muscles are sore when grapped, even though I havent done any training for weeks.

Summarize:
I have these pains daily. They are diffuse and I can’t figure out why and when they show up. They are mostly gone in the morning, but show up hours after I wake up. I have spent fortunes on treathment, lots and lots of time doing band exercises for the shoulders and other stuff that feels like desperation from the physicians. I am worried that it is symetric pains. I mean both knees, both elbow, both shoulder, both shoulderblades.

I am now 22 and have had these problems starting with the knees for 2 years. I am a sportsfanatic, so it is killing me not being able to perform or training towards something (triathlon for instance). I have now started (after reading here) on Scap Wall Slides and hope that will solve some problems on the shoulderissue, but I doubt it will work on my elbows.

I have thought about using drugs, to see if that would strengthen the muscles so I did no longer have this pain. I am thinking about steoroids. Though I have no intention of becoming big, I just want to be injury free and mostly occupy myslef with endurance sports combined with strentgh training.

I turn to this forum because of the big experience amongst various authors and members and that I simply do not know what to do.

Thank you for reading this. I hope you have some comments, but I understand if it is too weird a problem with all these injuries.

Have a nice day.

Best regards,
Brian, Denmark