Big Pain: Soreness and Struggles

Struggling to be patient

I continue to make progress despite being incredibly beaten down emotionally, physically, and mentally. I’ve successfully reached this month’s target of beating the previous month’s weight loss. I’ll be down over 20lbs in March, beating February’s 15lbs. Even better, I’m finally on track to meet my annual goal of losing 200lbs in 2025. As I’m writing this I am just under 50lbs down for the year already, a quarter down in a quarter.

Swimming is also going quite well. I broke a new record for continuous swimming time last week. I was able to swim at a consistent pace for 43 minutes straight. It was difficult, but showed me I’m able to accomplish much more than what I think is possible in the moment. The plan is not to push for a whole hour, but be able to at least hit 30 minutes of continuous swimming twice a week.

If none of this was ambitious enough, I’m also working towards a new goal: attempting push-ups. I’m very far from being able to move the full range of motion, but the hope is to be able to complete them in the future. Recently I’ve been not only doing modified push ups with a bar, but also attempting to move from a plank position downwards. I estimate I’m only moving down an inch or so, but it is something I’ll be working to improve on as time goes on.

Under-recovering

I wish I could say I feel good and/or accomplished. Truthfully I’ve been feeling absolutely terrible lately. I’ve been so worn down to the point it’s been difficult to think at all. It reminds me of a quote from my World of Warcraft days: “If your WoW (World of Warcraft gaming) interferes with your life that’s one thing, but if your life interferes with your WoW you have a problem”. It seems that in trying to push myself as hard as I could, I may have been characteristically impatient about it and pushed too quickly.

Recovery is very much my Achilles’ heel when it comes to overall health. It’s the first thing I ‘put on the backburner’ and the last thing I tend to improve. It’s clear that my pains and exhaustion are a consequence of not prioritizing proper recovery for the workload I hoped to take on. I was actually in denial about it for quite some time. I took for granted that at my size, I was unable to actually push myself “too hard” and that I was very far away from ever actually pushing my limits. It seems the problem is not with the targets themselves, but how I’ve been pacing myself.

The first thing I noticed as things started to take a toll on me was that it was incredibly hard to focus on anything. The only lucid moments that remained were when I was doing my exercises. Then I noticed that my performance was dropping, but I was quick to attribute it to other causes or blame myself for not trying hard enough. Eventually, I would begin to get more and more sore and hear pops and cracks in places I wasn’t before. One would think all this would stop me, but it was only once I bough wrist weights for walking and using them made me a new level of sore that I began to realize I had pushed too hard.

While I am glad I’m able to push very hard, I struggle with accepting that I have limits. To many it would be intuitively obvious that someone my size would have hard limits, but I’ve come so far that I’ve been so used to pushing harder and getting more out of it. I am determined to keep pushing hard, but I am deciding to give myself a large break this upcoming week to prioritize actual recovery. I am hoping this temporary cut-back will give me the time to be recharged to push hard consistently again. I want to make sure that this setback doesn’t deter me from my ambitious goals, but I take as an instructive failure to teach myself to recognize when my actual limits are near.

On pain

As I’ve experienced, there are three types of pain one gets from regular exercise. The first is the intense pain one experiences when they begin training part of their body that has never been used like that before. In my experience, this is the worst of it. It’s unavoidable, and as I’ve shifted my focus from lower-body to upper body I’ve had to face it all over again and it feels like it just never ends. The good news is that it does end and gradually shifts into the second type of pain. As the body gets used to strengthening particular muscles, the pain shifts from an intense cold sharpness to more of a dull warm firmness. This isn’t fun either, but is at least an order of magnitude easier to deal with. The last type of pain is from outright injury. Doing some kind of structural damage generally impairs you one way or another. I am glad that I haven’t had any injuries that have impaired my ability to keep going, but I’m learning that I do need to be careful.

Personally, I can’t quite trace it but physical and emotional pain are inextricably linked in my mind. If I’m feeling sore, I am compelled to feel like I am worthless. I speculate this manifests from my learned helplessness. If I’m in pain from trying to do something and fail, it must mean that I am deficient and therefore a problem or a burden. I am still working to improve this, but progress is quite slow. I’ve mentioned it before, but I’ve found ‘recovery days’ to be so much harder than training days because I feel stuck with the pain but none of the sense of accomplishment. This has created a vicious cycle where I’m too worn down to do things on rest days, so I feel even worse about them. Moving forward I’m going to try to use my ability to focus on non-exercise related things as a barometer for how well I’m recovering.

The present moment is very hard for me, but I am quite optimistic I will come out of this much better. Learning to grow stronger has taught me that pain often isn’t a “no” but a “not yet” signal from the body so long as one has reasonable expectations. It seems that just as I need to be patient for weight loss to happen, I also need patience for giving my body time to adapt to new changes. I will admit, it’s very disheartening to have regular, stark, painful reminders that I’m still so far from being able to accomplish so many ‘basic’ things. It’s genuinely very frustrating to have come so far and still feel the frustrations and limitations of my size.

Whirlwind of frustration

I’ve been disappointed in myself for not getting much done outside of my exercise schedule. Part of this has also been to me being stressed and frustrated about things not directly related to this journey. I’ve been quite worried about the whole USA Canada trade war thing that’s whipped up Canadians into fake-patriot fury. I feel entirely burnt out of my capacity to participate in wider discussions. This is in part because I’m really reflecting on lessons I’ve learned over the last few years, and many of them are no joy at all.

I’m grateful that this journey has taught me many things, but it also brings many difficult feelings to the forefront. I hate still being this big. I can’t stand not being able to do the things I’d love to do and continuing to feel so far away from it. It makes the serious progress I’ve made feel so bittersweet. Every bit more I can do makes the sting of being unable to do other basic things much harder to endure. With all this, I’ve been doing a terrible job at managing the stress of it all. I’m thinking in the future I need to come up with more proactive stress management strategies, rather than just addressing things when they get too difficult to deal with.

Recent finds

Nick’s Journey

I stumbled on Nick’s video How Hard Is It to Lose 100 kg (220 lb) in a Year? He’s done a great job documenting the journey and brings up many things that are incredibly familiar to me. I appreciate Nick putting his journey out there and sharing the highs as well as the lows. I’ll admit it was quite hard to watch this because it felt very much like looking in the mirror with all the similarities. When I remember having some nit-pick disagreements with some of the things he said, but I’ll chalk that up to us being different people. What I would absolutely echo Nick on is that it is an incredibly tough journey that is challenging as well as rewarding. Maybe once I’ve made it to where I want to be it would be neat to talk with Nick sometime.

What is enough?

If there was anything that really clued me in to the fact that I have to really focus on my moderation when it comes to pushing hard it would be the NASM talk Optimize is a 4-Letter Word. Consistency is the name of the game, but Darlene Marshall does a great job of asking ‘what is enough?’. The talk was a great reminder that chasing perfection and optimization can often sabotage satisfaction and even results. It was quite timely for this to come out when it did because it’s helping me refocus my energies on appreciating the wins and prioritize longer term progress.

Since reading Food Politics I’ve been reflecting on the broader concerns related to the intersection of health, business, and politics. NASM hosted another talk on The Truth About How Supplements Are Regulated. The talk includes many warnings to consider when one is trying to get into using various health supplements. The most obvious concerns being does the supplement contain what it claims to, are there additional additives, and does it actually work? As far as I understand it, this isn’t easy territory to navigate.

The dark side of fitness

The Bioneer takes on the difficult topic of Fitness and Mental Health. He does an excellent job talking about the limits of oversimplified advice on exercise and lifestyle. I like how he does a great job drawing the fine line between “training to live” vs “living to train”. He points out there are many phenomenal benefits to exercise, but it’s far from a ‘silver bullet’ that will cure all your problems in one simple stroke. He directly takes on the concern that for those who are stuck in ‘bigorexia’, or just the perception that more muscle is better, can fall into the trap of abusing performance enhancing drugs.

This doesn’t come from nowhere. Many of the people I take seriously in the fitness space will decry how influencers are often damaging to the cause of helping people take care of their health. Lyle McDonald explains how Fitness POISON is Everywhere and how it effects those trying to start their journey. Lyle points out that the hypocrisy and judgement prevalent on social media is often counter-productive and ultimately harmful. It’s a little amusing to hear this because I see the same patterns in the areas I pay attention to, it seems that no niche is safe from this problem. Money, politics, and status-seeking behaviors all impact conversations online and one always has to be careful where they put their trust.