Motivation Part Two

So what do you do after a year-long neck injury that is soon followed up with a stroke,  BOTH of which take away the strength in your right hand and arm?

You start working out in any way the doctor gives you permission and you wait for progress on the right side of your body because that's what you SHOULD do. I was extremely fortunate. I was extremely BLESSED to be able to come back from both injuries through lots of training and therapy.

Which brings me back to the original subject of motivation. I exaggerated a bit in the first part of this blog when I said that motivation has NOTHING to do with it. In reality, it plays a very small role. You'll never do ANYTHING unless you can manage in your own mind a very good reason for doing what you wish to accomplish, So what was my motivation? I really wanted to be able to do the things I used to do, about as well as I used to, before the two traumas.

My doctors and therapists agreed those were reasonable goals. In other words I had the REASON and the CAPABILITY to achieve my desire. The only thing missing was a plan on HOW to achieve it. The therapists supplied that by giving me a list a list of exercises and drills that would allow me to get small motor functions back in  my hand. Strength would follow as I continued light weight training, going up in the amount lifted over time.

I want to emphasize this, with my neck injury, I had to do what I could while I WAITED for my pinched nerves to start working again, and I had NO GUARANTEE THAT THEY WOULD. If you have very little grip and your fingers tingle and can't grip a weight, you should not be lifting said weight. It's dangerous and could do further damage. The stroke was different. IF I worked out hard, I was told I SHOULD get better. The two situations had to be treated entirely differently.

Another way I was blessed? I had time to mostly recover from ONE trauma before the next one occurred. IF the stroke had come at the same time as the neck injury, I might never have gotten any real function back. Because even though I had the goal, the capability would not have been there, and by the time my neck healed, the atrophy caused by NOT working out would have been so much harder to overcome. With strokes it's important to work out with what you can immediately after the stroke to stimulate new nerve growth. Your body has to establish new nerve tissue pathways to the affected muscles. Time is critical. That's one of the reason I have a difficult time training my right lat. It was nowhere near recovered when the stroke hit. As a result, I have yet to get it's function back. I might be capable of getting some function back now, so that's my current goal, but I'm also aware that one of the leading causes of my neck injury originally was training my lats hard. Straining to do lat work caused the disk to slip. I was literally training too hard. Moderation and care are going to part of any new lat training as a result.

Which again brings me back to motivation. BEFORE either incident, I was training with weights and walking/ and or jogging regularly, several days a week, most of my adult life. You would never know that by looking at me. At one point, about five years ago, I was over 300 pounds. I actually wondered how that could happen when I worked out so hard all the time. NOT decathlon hard mind you, but much harder than the average adult male of similar age.

Yes, I ate a lot of food, but I did that not because of some great "emotional need," I did it for the same reason I always did it, the same reason EVERYBODY eats. I ate like that because I was always HUNGRY.  After discovering the "low carb diet approach" I dropped the weight relatively easily in a matter of months, not because I had better motivation, not because I had better capabilities, it was because I had a plan that worked. It was a plan that removed my HUNGER. I was missing the knowledge on how to achieve permanent lifelong weight loss.

I want to emphasize this part again. I didn't lose the weight because I was more MOTIVATED. I lost the weight because I finally knew HOW. My goal was always the same. My motivation was always the same. Only the MEANS of achieving it changed. I needed a plan that addressed my biggest problem, unremitting hunger. The low carb diet did that.

(This is taking far longer than expected, more next time or when I have time...)