[quote]Professor X wrote:
[quote]yvanehtnioj wrote:
Hey Professor X
What’s your opinion on bulking when injured? I have bicep tendonitis in my right arm, so any type of barbell/smith pressing is out of the question right now. I can still train my left arm with different kinds of dumbell pressing. For back, I do various pulldowns and rows attaching one of those hanging ab raise straps onto a cable station to take out my right bicep from the movement. I do this for my left arm as well. My injury is significantly better than it was before, but it is only about 80% right now. I can train everything else properly and heavy though.
Would you recommend to wait until it’s entirely healed? I know that I have to be patient, and I’m only 19, so I know I have many years, but I still feel like I’m wasting some of my best growing years because of this injury. I’ve been slowly dropping some fat, but I’ve managed to gain size still. Would it be a good idea to just bulk and catch up my right arm later when it is healed? Did you still bulk during your bicep injury and tricep tear?
Thanks for the inspiration. I hope to shock you with my progress in a couple of years.[/quote]
I appreciate the post, man.
I would not recommend bulking while injured IF you have limited mobility. Your one arm doesn’t sound like it limits your ability to get around. For instance, after my car accident, I pretty much lost my appetite for a while just due to overall stress. I used a weight gainer to help me get the calories in, not in an attempt to “gain” necessarily, but to maintain the muscle I already had as optimally as possible.
The result was my injured shoulder doesn’t seem to have lost any size at all even though dealing with that issue was sometimes painful. I also gained extra body fat because of the overall caloric intake and the fact that most of it was liquid form.
That was just from trying to keep my weight exactly the same.
You, however, seem to have a chronic injury and yes, avoiding any type of gain during this period will set you back…but I also don’t want to flat out recommend you ignore the lagging body part completely. is the arm doing better now? Is it healing?
Training the unaffected side has also been shown to decrease atrophy in some people. That means I would still train what I could using as much common sense as possible. Whether you attempt a serious weight gain is up to you…but the one thing I would do is make sure most of that gain is muscle mass and not body fat.
Years of this will lead to huge imbalances unless you recover. Hopefully you will heal soon.[/quote]
Thanks for the quick response.
My arm is doing better now. I strained my right pec last March, so I’ve been dealing with this for quite a while. It spread to my shoulder because I stupidly kept trying to lift through the pain. My ego got the best of me and now I’m paying for it.I managed to bring up my arms about half an inch even though I couldn’t do any pressing exercises for my triceps. Early August, the bicep tendon down by the forearm started to hurt after a back session. It was and still is a very dull pain, but feels much better now. Previously, I could do back and bicep exercises pain free, but since mid August or so, I haven’t been able to load the right bicep and shoulder aside from machine lateral raises and rear delt stuff. It’s only the tendon in the front delt and bicep that bothers me.
I wasn’t going to ignore my right arm completely, though. I’m a little under 240 (down from a much fatter 255ish) first thing in the morning and my plan is to get up to 275-280 or so. I need to play around a little more with pulldown and rowing movements with my right arm first though. Also, I was going to hammer the shit out of my left arm, but go extremely light with very high reps focusing on squeezing and control for my left arm for pressing and curling. I suppose it’s better than nothing. Just kinda gradually build up the weight over time. I am going to pay very close attention to muscle and fat gain. I figure that within the next two months my arm should be good enough to load up again. How does that sound?
I’ve just been getting frustrated lately because this has been holding me back and I just want this so badly. Again, I really appreciate you reading this and taking the time to answer me. Just know that you are changing the lives of many people out there for the better in ways you may not realize. How do I know this? I’m one of those people.