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As I said at the end of my last post, I’m actually glad that I experienced that bad soreness beneath my right shoulder blade, because it led to my contacting my MDB Coach, which led to my becoming an MDB Coach, which led to this blog.

Here’s my journal entry about the letter I wrote my MDB Coach, Coach McD:

July 10, 2007

My Letter to Coach McD

When you sign up with Million Dollar Body, you get assigned a coach. Given the bad soreness behind my right shoulder blade, I decided this would be a good time to introduce myself to my coach, Coach McD, and pick his brain a bit.

Here’s what I wrote:

Hi Coach McD,

I just completed my first week of P90X, and I really enjoyed it!

I wanted to write to introduce myself to you and ask a question.

I haven’t been too sore this week and the soreness I have had has been good soreness with one exception. There is an area underneath my right shoulder blade that is feeling quite tight. Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t too bad. (I think it came mostly from punching a bit too hard yesterday with Kenpo X.)

However, this is an area that I need to be careful about as it is always tight because my shoulders are too loose and I am prone to shoulder dislocations. I was a three sport athlete in high school, and my already loose shoulders where further loosened by multiple dislocations playing football, basketball, and, to some extent, baseball… and when I say multiple I’m talking like 25 times each. My shoulder would pop out and pop back in… It would hurt… Numbness would set in… I’d slowly regain feeling… and I was ready to go. I elected to go to a great books college (St. John’s College in Santa Fe, NM) rather than pursue any athletic ambitions and I haven’t flexed my muscles much, other than my brain muscles, over the past 9 years (I’m 27). (Although my nutritional health has improved greatly over this time period, so I’m in decent shape… 5’9”, 153, 11%.) Now, for many reasons, I have decided that it is time for me to start working out again.

Anyway, other than any general advice you may have for taking care of my loose shoulders while doing P90X, I was wondering the following in particular: I’m trying to figure out what to do about pull ups… You see, it’s really not good for me to hang loose from a bar and I think pull ups are my weak spot. In the test I maxed out to failure at 6, and am capable of doing no more than 3-5 per set. I feel like this is not enough reps to really be effective. (I want to be able to do at least 8 right?) So, I was thinking about trying out the bands this week and perhaps trying using a chair with the pull up bar in the third week (although this is kind of difficult as my doorway pull up bar is already fairly close to the ground… it might be better just to do them with my feet on the floor).

Any thoughts?

Much Thanks, James

Hopefully, I will get a response from Coach McD soon. It would be really cool if this turned out to be a helpful/supportive aspect of my P90X experience.

Well, I sure did receive a response from Coach McD! Stay tuned…

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 at 6:22 pm and is filed under Exercise, MDB Coaching, MDB Community, P90X, Rich, Ripped. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.