It’s easy to injure ourselves while training Because that’s how it works. Underdoing it has downsides, just as overdoing does. The goal is the walk the line between the two. And it’s not such a fine line- I found that after the initial period of inflammation, each week I could add a thousand or several…
Just kidding. This is actually a post about measuring your progress. I strongly recommend you purchase some kind of step tracker. It doesn’t have to be a fancy $200-$300 device with heart rate, etc. No tracker is perfect; all have benefits and downsides. I chose the simplest one I could find, the Fitbit Blaze, because I…
No, I’m not suggesting you do home surgery. Nor am I suggesting you ignore anything your MD, surgeon, nurse, PT or other medical professional guides you to do. Do what they tell you! But it will not serve you to follow blindly (ask questions if you don’t understand, or if you are thinking that you…
Directly following surgery and at least for the next week or two, you’ll be pretty fragile and I would even say permeable, vulnerable. So be mindful of what you’re taking in by way of TV and movie and news. Of course, I had my surgery just before the 2016 election so the airwaves and news…
Overdoing it by overruling my intution and following a PT’s suggestion On my fourth day post-surgery, my Kaiser home visit PT (someone I had never met before) visited and, impressed with how easily I was moving around the house, asked me if I had been outside. “Outside?” I replied. “I wasn’t planning on leaving the…
You may have put a lot of work into selecting a surgeon and hospital facility, or, like me (in the Kaiser HMO system), you may just have had a very positive feeling about the surgeon you were assigned at random. That’s not completely accurate. I did interview another Kaiser surgeon, and I did call around…
If you’re a smoker, your surgeon will require you to quit smoking, for a whole set of reasons related to how it compromises your cardiovascular and respiratory systems. There’s a very good mind-training CD for this. By the way, this is equally true for smoking cannabis, if that’s something you do. Medical cannabis has been…
When you travel, do you start laying out clothes and toiletries a week in advance, or throw a bunch of stuff into a bag at the last minute? If you are in the latter camp, I suggest you get some assistance in building a list and making your way through it. You could think of…
Each of the below deserve their own post, but for now I’ll just list the tools I used, so you can have a sense of what you might be game to put into your own bag of tricks. Cold Therapy Mind training visualizations: Peggy Huddleston’s Prepare for Surgery, Heal Faster, and De-Discomfort and Surgical Support from Hemi-Sync Exercises for…
How much of your life can you put on autopilot? Can you set bills up for autopay? Think about all the chores you do in a week and who can do them for you. Do whatever you can to create a block of time that is solely about your healing. I can tell you from experience…