Bruised belly!

September 2009 training bruise

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 😛

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Mangled thumb

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:

Dettol bottle

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 😛

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Wobbly leg

Nearly two weeks back Black Belt Mama wrote a post on the wonderful wonderfulment (yes, you read that correctly :P) 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:

Sega Astro City

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.

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Wolverine-like healing??

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 :P), 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!!

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Magic mud

So, looks like there was another good reason to hold off on training last night, as my knee started playing up again (not my fake one, the real one :P). My knee typically gives me some trouble from time to time due to the extra work it has to do in supporting my body, and I think getting up after all the breakfalls last week pushed it a little further than usual. So, I thought I’d share a secret that may be a load of hogwash, but it seems to work a charm for me.

When Wifey and I were honeymooning in New Zealand a few years back, we came across this Deep Heat kinda stuff – it’s called “Therapeutic Mud” or something like that, smells a bit like Deep Heat, but apparently uses the thermal mud from Rotorua in the mix. We picked some up while we were over there as Wifey had mangled her ankles from all the walking around we were doing (though it probably didn’t help that she was wearing boots with massive heels on them from time to time if I remember correctly ;)), and the stuff worked extremely well. So, a while back I started using the mud on sore muscles – one time after a particularly heavy weights session both my arms seized up overnight and I couldn’t bend them from the elbow. Added some mud, and in a few days they were right as rain, and in the interim it took away the immediate pain I was getting from them. I’ve also noticed it has a beneficial effect on my knee when it gets a bit achy – sometimes I’ll do it as a precaution after a heavy training session, and sometimes I do it if there’s some general aching (like last night). To be honest, I really should have used some after the breakfall training last week as a preventative act, but was feeling lazy when I got home and didn’t. Hopefully I’ll remember to do the right thing next time 😛

I’ve only ever found it in NZ, and when my folks went there in 2007 (or was it last year?), we had them bring back a couple of tubes of the stuff for us. If people are genuinely interested, I’ll take a photo of it and post some details. Like I said, it may be all in my head, but I’ve found it does wonders for me, much better than actual Deep Heat or some of the other anti-inflammatory gels I’ve used in the past.

I should also start making regular trips to the physio to try and keep the knee in good order – I remember when I first started having knee troubles back in 2004 after I fell down the stairs in our townhouse that the improvement was huge after I saw a physio who used a combination of acupuncture and ultrasound (I think it was ultra sound, my memory’s hazy :P) on my knee. Ah well, I’m sure one day I’ll get off my behind and start 🙂

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