Before & After - Recovering From Shoulder Labral Repair on Both Arms!

cwsmith35

I've been dealing with shoulder issues as long as I can remember. When I was a kid, I thought my shoulders were "double jointed", and I used to move them around to impress my friends (insert sad laughter here). I played baseball and golf, and it didn't bother me too much. A couple times a year, my shoulder would subluxate, but the soreness would go away in a day or two.

When I was in my 20's, I really got into working out, and I didn't have many issues, I'm 5'11" 185lbs, and even though I was a hard gainer, I could bench, squat, and deadlift 275-295lbs each. Yes, the mental barrier of 300 was real for me. haha. Unfortunately, each year in my 30's, things got worse. By the time I was 38, I could work around it in the gym, but something as simple as a home renovation project would cause me a lot of pain, and I couldn't even comfortably swing a golf club anymore. So, I decided it was time to go under the knife.

Turns out both labrums had 360 degree tears! 16 anchors (both shoulders combined) and 3 months later, I was trying to recover from two shoulder surgeries. Things got really brutal after I separated my left shoulder (had never even heard of such a thing) during physical therapy. It sucked. I got pretty depressed and felt like I'd never be able to use my arms again. In fact, I had to take an Uber to and from work for about 3 weeks, because I couldn't use either of my arms well enough to maneuver a steering wheel!

Luckily, I didn't give up, and I really did everything I could think of to get better. After my PT prescription ran out (health insurance didn't want to cover it anymore, so that was awesome....), I went ahead and hired a personal trainer. I never thought I'd hire a personal trainer, simply because I knew so much about working out already. However, these guys seemed like kind of a blend between PT and personal trainers, and I was honestly desperate for all the help I could get. After about 6 months of training with these guys, I got back to normal!

The first couple months, the workouts were a lot like the PT I had been doing, but after that, they started introducing interval training, and finally, they had me lifting weights again. One thing that I thought was really interesting was the German Volume Training they introduced me to, which focuses a lot on time under tension, but I'll save that info for a future post if people are interested. The personal trainers I chose actually did a big writeup on me on their website, so you can see their Personal Training Success Story. Obviously, they put their own plug in there, but I thought it was a cool writeup. I let them have all my footage I recorded during my recovery.

At this point, I still have a little discomfort in my left shoulder due to the shoulder separation. I have some of the same limitations in the gym as before, such as difficulty lifting heavy weight overhead, and doing heavy bench press still doesn't quite feel comfortable. However, day-to-day activities have drastically improved, and I am starting to play sports again. I feel pretty happy about the progress so far, and I'm optimistic things will only get better!