The Rotarua Thermal Mud (aka Magic Mud) came to my rescue (again!) this week – I’ve discussed before how it’s like a piece of awesome in liquid/paste/cream/whatever form (as recently as just over a month ago, actually!), and following this week’s training (particularly the resistance training on the stances), my knee was feeling a bit sore and inflamed. So, as per the usual, I slapped on plenty of mud and gave it a good rub in while watching a classy episode of Thundercats in bed, tried my best to relax my muscles and not sleep in a weird position, and sure enough, it was right as rain the next day.

When I finish this tube of it, I’m definitely going to grab some more (pretty sure Wifey’s found an online store that sells it) – I swear by the stuff, it always works a treat.

Although it might have been the combination of a double-awesome – Thundercats + Magic Mud. Sounds very scientific to me.

Bloginated Friday, 30th October 2009 / Injuries
Tag-isms: knee | Magic mud | Rotarua Thermal Mud

This is an image of my stomach just above the belly button after a short session of iron stomach training – Jyastin-kun has excellent targeting and accuracy considering how many strikes we did and it’s all focused into a single spot! This photo was taken Friday, so by now it’s started going all yellow around the purple/red area and isn’t as painful as it was last week.

I’m not sure what it says about me personally that I find this kind of thing amusing And yes, we all know how attractive my hairy man-belly is

Bloginated Monday, 21st September 2009 / Injuries
Tag-isms: body conditioning | bruising | stomach impact | stupid injuries | training

Observe the awesomeness that is my latest injury!

… well, rather, don’t observe because I don’t have any impressive images Didn’t go to training last week as I was unable to even remotely form a fist with my right hand, which makes it hard to do all sorts of stuff, and I was afraid of further damage during any grappling or kumite exercises. It’s almost better now, but I’m hesitant to go back to training tomorrow night in case it accidentally re-opens the wound…. hmmmm…

As for what I did? Was really stupid – I was picking something up off the floor in the bathroom, and the knuckle on my thumb knocked into one of the stainless steel containers in the bathroom. Figured all I’d done was a light paper cut, but it turned out that I almost took the top of my knuckle off – hanging by a flap was all this awesome exposed flesh and muscle, looked really gross and stung a bit as I soaked it in crazy Dettol:

For the first week I was changing the dressing daily and working hard to keep it from getting wet – there was a Dettol + Betadine combo on the wound and under the skin flap, couple of band-aids, then thick sports tape holding the thumb straight to try and stop me bending my thumb. It’s now a week and a half later, and I’m down to only having a single band-aid over it and can almost bend it back like normal without it feeling like it’s going to split right open again. I figure by the weekend, it should be back to normal so I can start with some weight training during the week and then back to training.

Considering how it looked and the fact I didn’t get it infected, I will also take this moment to observe I was tapping into my crazy Wolverine healing powers

Stupid thumb

Bloginated Tuesday, 18th August 2009 / Injuries
Tag-isms: Hooray for Dettol | stupid injuries | thumb | Wolverine healing powers

Nearly two weeks back Black Belt Mama wrote a post on the wonderful wonderfulment (yes, you read that correctly ) that she terms Gym-Legs. While I can’t profess to the plural, I can confidently say I have the case of the wobblies with my right leg. I spent the Saturday and Sunday afternoons just gone squatting, sitting or standing behind my latest toy:

Yes, that’s a Sega Astro City. It barely fit through the door, the chassis (the boards the power the tube monitor) blew 4 days after first receiving it, and even after installing a refurbished chassis on the weekend and accidentally blowing that up (note to my fellow nerds – don’t forget to connect that earth cable on your video chassis!!!), I still love it. I think Wifey will come to love it too once I’ve stopped nerding around on it and we can play some old school scrolling fighting games or Moon Patrol together, but we’ll see how that goes.

Anywho, Saturday and Sunday arvo were spent wiring up, testing, and disassembling the chassis, throwing in some extra wiring on the JAMMA adapter for MVS stuff, and swearing profusely at it. This involved all manner of sitting/standing/squatting/storming-off-in-a-huff, and my right leg is well and truly telling me off now.

So this one’s to BBM – I’m totally feeling your pain right now!

What’s making it doubly interesting is that I’m hammering through my second cold in a row, which means my asthma’s flaring up and doing a good leg workout to iron out the kinks is out of the question. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a solution!

Once again, karate comes in to save the day – I spent about 20 minutes this evening going through all my leg stretches I normally do in class, and then did a couple of dynamic leg lifts afterwards. The end result certainly isn’t perfect, but it’s a damn sight better than before!

So there you are – if you’ve done yourself a nerd injury from tinkering with stuff, karate training can help you get back on your feet. Or in my case, foot I’ll hopefully be ready to roll into a good weight training session tomorrow after work, complete with my usual stretches and exercises in prep for next week’s class.

Bloginated Monday, 1st June 2009 / Injuries
Tag-isms: stupid injuries

Alright, let’s recap on this week’s two stupid injuries – mangled my right thumb training on Monday night due to poor form, and whilst changing a tire on Wednesday night straight after work (because that’s really what you want to be doing after a long, unproductive day in the carpark near your workplace ), I gave my left thumb a good mangling when the spare I was taking out the boot bounced back into my fully-extended thumb and caused my hand to swell up like a balloon

Weirdly enough, it’s Friday, and everything is pretty much healed up.

I iced the thumb on Monday night straight after the injury, woke up Tuesday and it was practically all better, and was back to normal by Wednesday. I should have iced up my left hand on Wednesday night before going to bed, but despite this, I iced it up before and after work yesterday and again before I went to work this morning, and it’s almost back to normal.

Freaky.

I normally take longer to heal up from stuff like this. Hell, even my knee’s been better of late. Not that I’m complaining or anything. Hopefully its a sign I won’t mangle myself as much in the future, or if I do, I’ll bounce back reasonably quickly. I’m like Wolverine, if he suffered from some wussy bruising on his thumbs and stuff, and was a ranga. Hahaha, Wolverine as a ranga – that’s crazy talk.

It was actually Jyastin-kun who coined the Wolverine-healing concept – one time he seriously mangled his hand at work, and he healed up miraculously fast. His doctor, with his broken English, said he was Wolverine. Y’know, because of how fast he healed. I thought that was awesome, so I thought I’d steal the phrase and apply it to me. Because Wolverine is awesome, and the new movie is looking like it might be tip-top. At least it couldn’t be worse than Spider-man 2 or a Schumacher-directed Batman movie.

So yeah, I’ll leave my rant here Might add something worthwhile to this blog shortly!!

Bloginated Friday, 3rd April 2009 / Injuries
Tag-isms: stupid injuries