The Trail to Recovery Week and Beyond Weeks 2 & 3

My recovery from shoulder surgery and attempt to become a downhill racerFirst off sorry for missing a week in the blog. I returned to Ireland after the Xmas holidays at home in France only to discover I had an exam coming up. I was in a bit of a panic to study and the blog slipped my mind for a while.

I have being resting for the past 2 weeks and I feel my shoulder is getting better slowly. The pain is pretty much gone and I can sleep through the night without constantly getting woken up. I saw my physio last Wednesday and he said my recovery is coming on really well. When he saw me it had been 3 weeks since the operation and he said I had already hit my all the 5 week goals. This meant I was able to take my brace off and start using my left arm again.

I have been thinking about my training plan and I have come up with a program for the first few weeks.

At the moment I can't really use my left arm so I am going to be using the recumbent bike for a few weeks. I plan to work up a base aerobic level of fitness by doing 6 x 1h recumbent bike sessions a week. 5 of the sessions are going to be pyramid work and I'll do one tougher session a week. The harder session will consist of a 15 warm up then 40 min of sets of 2min steady aerobic pace (not easy pace) with 30s of hard anaerobic work at the end of those 2 min then back to the 2min of steady pace etc.. then a 10 min warm down. I will be doing this for 3 weeks.

After those 3 weeks I wish to start running 4 times a week on top of the bike sessions. These will be endurance runs of about 7-10km at a steady pace. I also wish to change over to a turbotrainer rather than the recumbent bike if my shoulder permits as I have been told this is better for training.

After 2 weeks of this hopefully my shoulder will have healed some more and I will be able to start some cycling on the road. I will then transfer some of my turbotrainer bike sessions onto the road bike.

On top of these sessions I want to start doing some core strength work and some stretching. I don't really know what to work on but a friend has advised I watch some of James Wilson videos as he said they offer some really good training routines. I also plan to slowly start back swimming ( I used to swim every day before the operation) as I found this was great for working on core and upper body strength and flexibility.

I'll also be working on my weak shoulder with my physio and doing all the exercises he gives me.

As you can see I won't be doing any skill training on the bike for a few weeks as my shoulder is still in quite bad shape and the surgeon said I won't be able to ride my mountain bike for at least 10 weeks post op.

I know the plan isn't very clear so far but this is my first try at a training program and I plan to modify the program depending on what is working well and what isn't.

All criticism is welcome ( as long as it is helpful )