Hmm. Interesting

[helen99]

My orthopedic surgeon who put my wrist back together. Fresh out of school, all kinds of new ideas. Eh well, maybe it's for the best - my physical therapist said that people would kill to get the range of motion back that I now have.

Range of motion - about 10 degrees short of full range forward bend, full range everywhere else. I gained 15 degrees in the forward bend in the past two weeks, so that should be corrected shortly.

Grip strength - needs work. My right hand grip reads 60 on the gauge and my left hand reads 40. The left is normally about 5-10% weaker than the right, but this is more like 30% weaker. I have a couple of exercises to do with silly putty and elastic bands... Hopefully two weeks from now when we measure again, it will have improved.

Lifting strength - even at 5 and 5 for both hands. The right can actually lift a lot more, but waiting for lefty to catch up before increasing. The left arm still looks like spaghetti (less so than before but still) and has difficulty lifting five in certain directions. For example if I do lateral raises, after two sets of ten reps each, the left arm (not hand, oddly enough) starts to lag. But it can do it (it's not like I'm giving it a whole lot of choice)...

Started taking advantage of gym at work for treadmill, stairmaster, machines, and free weights.

Edit: So I was just at the gym. Both arms can now lift 8. The right arm has no problem with 8, the left is "training to failure" as they say in the parlance. By contrast, the lower body. A few weeks ago I started with maybe 65 pounds - not much at all (the leg press is what they start you on to make you think you're lifting a lot of weight). The interesting part is the increase in just two weeks. Today the usual 120 was starting to feel a bit light. I increased it up to 160 thinking maybe it would get heavier. It didn't. Then I increased it over 200, upward to 260 by increments. Still light. Then I increased it to 300. Starting to offer some resistance. I just leg pressed 300 pounds. Probably not very impressive, but I'm beginning to think this stuff really works.

Comments

[arethinn]

I'm continually amazed at how much work goes into healing this kind of injury when the fix for a similar (a bit less severe) fracture of my wrist when I was 11 was "put a cast on for 4 weeks, remove, the end". No physical therapy, nothing.. apparently being a growing kid was enough. (Although it did take a while, in my memory, for me to regain full movement.)

[helen99.livejournal.com]

Most of what I'm doing now is just to see how much I can improve overall strength and stamina with weight bearing exercise. The wrist was pronounced ok several weeks ago. The thing is, being a perfectionist about these things, I keep comparing the left with the right (which is also exercising, so is a moving target)... It may take forever for the left to catch up.

That said, I think the route of surgery and physical therapy (no cast) are relatively new developments. The PT started a week after the fracture, so the time that would have been spent in the cast was instead spent with exercises. At the six-week mark (when the cast would have come off, they started me on the weights to get the strength back up. To tell the truth, I'm not sure which route would have been best. 6 weeks in a cast, then some exercise, or spork and exercise right away.