On drunken arm wrestling, pain, inflammation, and weightlifting
Let me recount two semi-original thoughts conceived during a shower before dinnertime.
First thought: last weekend, I got myself into more drunken arm wrestling. Someone was impressed by my weightlifting, and I decided to further drive home the point by easily knocking out my admirer. However, I made the mistake of challenging someone else, and this time I ran out of gas after a stalemate, and decided to cop out. Unsurprisingly, my shoulder pain from previous rounds of drunken arm wrestling, as some of you may recall, returned with a vengeance.
So I decided to see an orthopedic surgeon yesterday after suffering from an uncomfortable squat session the day before. This doctor was a non-interventionist, which I thoroughly enjoyed. He couldn’t diagnose what the problem was despite X-rays, and some movement tests. This was not bad news, as he suspected the problem must then be relatively minor. He prescribed some physical therapy (which I am too lazy to follow up with, probably for my own good), no weightlifting for at least two weeks, and diclofenac sodium (a.k.a. Voltaren) for pain and inflammation.
I was taking these pills yesterday, but I have decided to ditch them besides “physio” for two reasons. First, they can cause stomach bleeding, so it seems to be yet another classic case of “the cure being worse than the disease.” Second, I speculate that pain and inflammation exist for a reason: not only as reminder to your conscious self not to further aggravate the injury (and many animals visibly feel pain, meaning that they must be conscious to some extent), but also as a signal to ancient subsystems to perform their miracle work of healing slowly but surely.
Second thought: I have not been losing weight despite eating relatively well (albeit with some minor infractions around the “holiday” season). I suspect this is largely due to continued serious weightlifting at sufficiently heavy weights, which must ultimately deliver a stronger anabolic than catabolic signal (given adequate recovery); otherwise, resistance is literally futile.
I am not alone in this thinking; in fact, it was Nassim Nicholas Taleb who originally shared this thought with me. As such, I plan to stop weightlifting for a while for two reasons: to recover from a shoulder injury, and to lose some excess fat. Yes, I will probably lose some strength, and yes, at my age, it will be more difficult to gain it back. I am happy enough that I nearly reached my resolution — 390 out of 405 lbs deadlift PR — last year. Let’s see whether this hypothesis is right.
