Today is my day for cardio. I hope to get in a 1-hour run. Yesterday the Lord gave me a good day of weight training but I had to be extra careful since last Friday I had begun to experience some pain in my left shoulder during my bench presses. I had been doing several things wrong. In the first place, I had been failing to retract my shoulders while pressing. I had also made the mistake of lifting with a completely flat back. I need to learn to arch my upper back by retracting my shoulder blades and raising my chest up towards the ceiling. Lastly, I had been failing to stack my elbows under the bar, thus creating unnecessary torque on my shoulders. So yesterday I avoided all lifting involving my chest and shoulders and focussed instead on my arms and legs. Today my shoulder is almost pain free and I'm hoping to be able resume my bench presses on Friday. I'm also hoping that I've learned my lesson because climbing mountains requires good upper body strength, and it makes no sense to return to Zermatt this summer unless I am able to use my shoulder joints properly.
The lessons we learn in life! I am definitely learning many lessons from training. Someone has described running as a "thinking man's sport." The reference is to the fact that so many middle-class, highly-educated people take up the sport. I'm not sure that's true, but I do think that our bodies are sophisticated pieces of hardware that are always relaying messages to us. We ignore these messages at our own peril. There are times when training just has to stop because our bodies are telling us to do so.