Dufisthenics

Late last week at the gym I managed to hurt myself.  I was doing slow negative handstand push ups while on top of push up handles.  The different hand position and extra height from being on the handles made the negatives feel quite difficult.  As I got to the bottom of of the movement I felt tremendous strain in my shoulders and triceps.

Well on Friday I was going to try Ray’s routine but the shoulder pain, which felt like it was in my left front delt, changed those plans.  I instead decided I would do some weighted pull ups, figuring those would not aggravate the shoulder much.  Well I was wrong.

After rep 2 with 45 pounds hanging around my waist I dropped off the bar after I felt a sharp pain from that area in my shoulder.  I flipped over the rest of my workout to be legs only, anything dealing with the upper body did not feel good.

I avoided any body weight work all weekend as I can still feel the pain.  I am hoping it is just a strain that will work itself out in a few days.  Until then I will be sticking to exercise that doesn’t hurt.

On Friday I received an envelope in the mail with a return address of New York.  At first I was confused what it was but the I recognized the name, it was Keith who is part of the NYC Bar-barians group.

Inside the envelope were a number of rubber Bar-barian bracelets.  Zef told me he was going to send me a few to give away as prizes in upcoming forum contests.  I took the liberty of commandeering one for myself.

I think the bracelet will actually be a great source of positive energy for me.  When I am feeling negative or unmotivated a simple glance at my left wrist should be all that is necessary to give me a kick in the ass.

I am not sure which contest will be the first one where I use the bracelets as prizes.  The past couple months participation in the contests has dropped off pretty significantly.  I am not sure if it is just because it is summertime or something else. I am actually considering taking August off with contests as my “summer break”.  Maybe a month away would make interest ramp back up.

Whatever contest we offer up the bracelets as prizes will need to be carefully configured.  When loot is involved there has to be strict guidelines in place so subjectiveness plays very little in the eventual outcome.  Sometimes there is too wide of a field of  acceptable attempts where sloppier form/rom gets thrown together with perfect form attempts.

Last week I bought a jar of locally produced Mangrove Honey at the farmers market.  Honey is a great superfood and getting it locally means it doesn’t have all the negative side effects of processing that nationally distributed honey has.

I plan to add a tablespoon of honey into my morning food/supplement routine which currently includes a multi-vitamin, fish oil capsule, scrambled egg beaters, wheat toast with peanut butter and a small glass of orange juice.

I was considering doing some work on Lou’s parallelettes to try to strengthen their mounting point to the 4×4’s.  After not coming up with an easy/simple way to do that I actually considered building a second set out of 1 1/4″ galvanized pipe.

That idea got thrown in the toilet after I priced out what I would need.  Galvanized pipe is very expensive, I would have spent $100 or more just buying the materials.  Considering I could buy a set of parallelettes for less than that I scrapped that idea.

Well last night as I was watching tv, I was on the floor working again on the bars. I was considering my options.  One of those options would be to drill a second hole in each mounting point to eliminate the slight side to side movement I was seeing.  But I decided to try something simpler at first.

I brought out my socket set.  When I first got the bars I just used a small adjustable wrench to try to tighten the bars.  With the socket I was able to torque the bolts much tighter.  When I was done I didn’t feel any more side to side slop.

If they loosen up again I still may opt to drill a second hole that would be perpendicular to what is in there now which in theory should eliminate the movement.  It would be accomplished much easier if I had a drill press.