And, wrists are delicate. Really narrow joint to build stability around. People that work with their hands get this for free. Gymnasts start at a young age where the absolute load is comparatively light. Meanwhile, people with desk jobs that start an active lifestyle in adulthood have catching up to do. I imagine Dan John as carrying heavy shit overhead because it was a fun challenge from childhood and that capacity feeds into the challenges he can put himself through, and subsequently challenges he puts on paper afterwards.
Sometimes fatigue is just what we get when we ask our body to deliver beyond what it has been acclimated to.
I’ve never tried straps on KB swings but that might make it worse? Now the straps will yank on your wrists sideways after the bell reaches it’s apex. Wraps on the other hand, somewhat loose, might help?
legs pretty tired and mentally not prepared going in- felt a LOT better after the first set. Wrist wraps make a huge difference. Only got 3 unbroken 50 rep sets but conditioning was good enough to cut rests between clusters down to 2min
Just stumbled across this. Happy to see someone else doing the 10000 swings.
My wrists never ached (I just did workout 12 of 20), but I get real bad forearm inflammation during the 50rep sets though. It helped that I wrapped the handle in grip tape. Finger flexors don’t have to work as hard.
Sometimes I soak my forearms in ice water for 3 minutes after a workout.
Do you find that the worst part is the sense of dread as you are about to begin a 50rep set?
Wrist wraps should be enough to solve the problem and allow your wrists to heal over time.
Do pushups aggravate the problem? If they do, pushups off a bar will help.
There are also some good drills you can do with a bucket of rice that are low impact and will get blood flow to the area.
From my limited experience with depression (I had a bad spell last year, which made me realise I’d probably had mild symptoms for most of my adult life), the answer is probably more than one thing. My favourite quote is a Jim Carrey one:
“I believe depression is legitimate. But I also believe that if you don’t exercise, eat nutritious foods, get sunlight, get enough sleep, consume positive material [and] surround yourself with support, then you aren’t giving yourself a fighting chance”
On surface value, I’m sure you’re doing all these things but diving a little deeper, I take it to mean “are you doing all the things you need to take care of yourself”. For me that means relaxing my dietary rules a bit, allowing myself to rest if I need to, meditate if I need to. Consider Dan John’s “Work, Rest, Play and Pray”, which am I missing out on?
I recently felt myself backsliding (around the time COVID started hitting home, no coincidence), so the steps I took were:
Cut out all stressful workouts. That was not the time for Kill or be Killed workouts
Rethought my night time routine - started earlier, added a decaffeinated hit drink, removed screen time, added a series of books that I knew to be relaxing.
Cut myself some slack on diet. I stopped logging and just made sure I did a few basics: enough protein, not a load of crap. If I want a meat filled baguette with mayo for lunch, I’ll have it. Better that than a full blown depression fuelled meltdown.
Actively saught interaction with others, particularly those I trusted to be a positive influence.
Those were my steps, along with probably a few others that addressed any need i felt i had without sacrificing anything important. It will probably look different for yourself, as you likely have different needs.
Edit: slightly gutted to see @Voxel post has gone MIA, I was genuinely looking forward to reading it.
This doesn’t necessarily indicate depression. It can obviously but it can be a variety of other things as well.
Hormones come to mind first (you’ve already mentioned that one) and then deep fatigue as in overtraining or under recovering would be the next bet. My money would be on fatigue, if I was a betting man.
Sorry, I’m not @Voxel, I just thought this is something I might be able to way in on.
I can only speculate, but you asked for ideas, so I’ll try my best. Don’t feel obliged to reply, and take it all with a hefty amount of salt.
I recently expressed to @MarkKO in another topic that just because we don’t actively perceive something as impacting us doesn’t mean we aren’t impacted,
And with respect to that, and also relevant in the context of why the above was ever put into words is that even though some among us might be fortunate enough to feel,
the reality is still that we have an ongoing global pandemic,
and that might affect your emotional state without you noticing. I don’t know what streams of consciousness you take part in while you are online, but I’m seeing people online that normally wouldn’t be and mostly everyone is expressing their discontent, worry, and angst publically. It doesn’t have to affect a person, but I for one am affected by their emotional state. And those are just tiny blips on my radar, friends losing jobs etcetera makes far bigger waves.
Further on the same tangent with regards to things that may have an emotional cost or toll, regardless of you actively perceiving it is that I’d be exhausted if I had to deal with the tone that some people have when they post in your log. Either that doesn’t affect you at all, it directly affects you (but then you’d know if that was the issue) or it’s something you subconsciously parry, and if it’s the latter well…
Then we have the physical health/mental health bit. As @dagill2 mentioned, hormone levels can certainly be a culprit.
This might have a relationship with your training as well. I know it wasn’t super long ago you deloaded, however, I cannot recall if you deloaded intensity wise or volume-wise. But given my perception of how you treat your rest days, I’m not sure your body was given the decrease in training stress that it needed. It’s fine to go in for a heavy top-set but that should be adequate during a deload.
Training, even though it makes us feel good, is a stressor.
I like what Dr. Jade Teta has written on SHMEC (sleep, hunger, mood, energy, cravings). When I’m under-recovering I see problems with all of those. Your sleep rarely seems affected by anything other than caffeine but sounds like a few of those “boxes” are ticked off potentially indicating an issue with your exercise/eating/recovery-balance. I really hate to belabor the point, especially after acknowledging that I myself would be exhausted with some of the input you are the receiving party to but there is a pattern with people telling you that you are doing too much.
And how do hormones and training relate to one another. This is not my area of expertise (nor is mental health) but looking at your training sessions I can’t help but imagine you being at risk of having to release a lot of cortisol to mobilise glycogen stored in your muscles. And what happens then is something referred to as the pregnenolone steal. Cortisol and testosterone are both made from pregnenolone, but if you use all of your pregnenolone to make cortisol that leaves you with very little left to make testosterone.
I’m not sure what your dietary habits are around training nowadays but I know at one point you’d go for a really long walk after having done a monster session. So I could see how you might end up using all the glycogen you had available for use without mobilising cortisol to get more glycogen.
I’ve shared information about carbohydrate needs around different types of training before (original author CT),
and you very often fall into case 4.
And sometimes we are just sad. Feeling depressed is fortunately not the same as being clinically depressed.
