Hello everybody. I’ve been following T-Nation for a while but joined up to ask a pretty darn particular question. How do I lift healthily with one and one-third arms?
Eleven years ago, an elderly driver merged into my motorcycle on the interstate. I kissed a concrete crash barrier at seventy miles an hour, rotating my left arm out of its socket and pulling it nearly completely off, held to my body by a string of flesh about the size of your pinky. It was a severe dislocation, paralyzing the arm. It was generally assumed that it would stay paralyzed, until the inevitable infection necessitated amputation sometime in the future. Limbs lacking ennervation generally don’t stay on very long.
A year later the top of the forearm began twitching, specifically, the flexor carpi radialis. It could move my arm when I was in the pool. Over the next six months the arm was twitching in several places and suffused with a burning sensation. At the end of this recovery period an electromyogram determined that my left arm was 23% enervated. Two major nerves had snapped, probably the thoracic and scapulary nerves. Judging from function and from common sense, the radial nerve had made it largely unscathed. Over the next eleven years the lack of enervation would visibly destroy a number of muscles in the left arm, most obvious being the lateral and posterior deltoid muscles, less obvious being a lot of muscles in the hand, forearm and shoulder. You have to look at my forearms and hands for a bit before you realize one is a lot beefier than the other. The left shoulder is pretty obvious, however.
The accident has done more damage inside my head than it did to my body, but that’s another story, and not one for this venue. I’ve been having some trouble in the weight room and I was wondering if the biomechanics here could help me out.
Military presses . . heh. Yeah. I don’t work shoulders at all. There’s nothing for the left side to do. I could work out the right side by itself, but I’m worried that all that off-side torque may cause more harm than good. I have two arms but only one spine. Am I doing the right thing here?
Rows are a problem. The left elbow just does not want to go back very far. I try to go around this by doing close-grip rows and keeping my elbows down, but the right side never really feels worked, long after the left side quits.
With chins I’m not sure if it’s my injury or if it’s because I just suck. I go up fast and strong until the upper arm is parallel with the floor, then -bap- I turn into the fat kid from Goonies. Shaking and going nowhere. I drop down to the starting position, go again, zoom up, then -bap- in the nowhere zone. I’m not sure which muscles are activated near the top of the chin, but if any of them are the ones I’m missing, well, that could explain this. If I’ve got all the muscles I need and I’m still missing, then I could hit that body part until I am chinning like . . well, chinning like a great big fat bastard, but still chinning.
Bench pressing used to be easier, even post-injury- but as the weight goes up it’s getting harder and harder to keep the bar level. The lack of a deltoid on the left side, combined with the lack of stabilizing muscles in the upper left side of the back, means the right side has way more get-up-and-go than the left. Strangely, it’s the right shoulder that hurts on a hard chest day, perhaps because it has to take more weight than is its share. I’m thinking of shifting away from the 5x5 for chest days and going to something a bit more high-volume, 3x8 or somesuch. Not sure if that will help save the good shoulder, but hey, maybe someone reading this knows.
Deadlifts are strange. It’s a strong exercise for me, but when I pull heavy I lose enervation in the left arm. It reverts to a limp piece of meat for about thirty seconds while I beat on it and fling it around, before it slowly starts moving on its own again. I haven’t dropped the bar yet because of this, but if I do I will probably get a stern lecture from the gym supervisor girl. Either that or my arm will come out of my socket and I won’t be able to hear the supervisor girl because I will be lying on the floor screaming like Lolita. I’m not too worried about this and continue to deadlift. I want to be able to pick up the back end of my car eventually. It’s a very small car, mind you.
I never used to like squats, but as the weight goes up I’ve learned to love them. I have very wide hips and short stubby legs, so I do pretty well, and this exercise doesn’t touch my injured bits. Unfortunately, lacking a deltoid means there’s no place to put the bar on a front squat. It just rolls right off the clavicle on the left side. That’s fine by me- back squats are what I’m used to. Hopefully I’m not screwing something else up with these weights.
Any help I could solicit from you folks, or anyone with similar problems? Any help would be fantastic.