Cinemorphosis

Category: Health and Fitness

  • How a Torn Rotator Cuff Tried to Break Me

    How a Torn Rotator Cuff Tried to Break Me

    A rotator cuff injury is an affront to the human desire for control. You follow instructions and protocols to avoid injury and get stronger, but the pain reminds you that you can’t control the trajectory of recovery. Complete rest could be its own disaster. You’re choosing between two bad options.

    Not only do you lose control of your body in ways you never imagined—you can’t optimize.

    If you’re an exercise buff who struggles with weight and is waiting for affordable versions of GLP-1 drugs, as I am, the compromises forced by a shoulder injury are disconcerting.

    My workout on November 29, with kettlebells integrated with shoulder rehab exercises, was not encouraging. My shoulder felt worse afterward. When the Motrin wore off and I woke up at two in the morning, I could tell the training had aggravated it. I began thinking about giving up the Farmer’s Walk with a 45-pound kettlebell in each hand. Perhaps that was too much. My entire training life has been a process of eliminating one exercise after another.

    With my shoulder still aggravated from the workout, on November 30 I decided to try my Schwinn Airdyne again, but this time I wouldn’t use my left arm to row the lever. I would rest my hand on it and rely mostly on my legs. The problem was psychological. Using my arms fully, I had burned 600 calories in about 50 minutes—probably more, since the calorie monitor doesn’t calculate body weight, and several forums claim that an hour on an air bike burns around 1,000 calories. Not using my arms would reduce my output, which, in a gamified world, is demoralizing. Still, even without using my arms, the calorie burn would exceed that of walking the neighborhood for an hour while worrying about stray dogs and car fumes.

    Exactly a week before—on the day my Airdyne workout was followed by nerve pain shooting down my left arm—I burned 600 calories in 52 minutes, which comes to 11.54 calories per minute. A week later, three days after seeing the doctor, I tried the Airdyne again with a significant disadvantage: I couldn’t row with my left hand. During the session, I protected my shoulder with three strategies. I rested my hand on the lever with no pushing or pulling; I gripped my towel with the left hand while my right arm did the rowing; or I grabbed the towel draped over my neck with both hands. Not surprisingly, I didn’t burn as many calories as the week before. I burned 601 in 57 minutes, which was 10.54 calories per minute. My calorie-burn efficiency was down 9.5 percent.

    Despite the significant drop in efficiency, the experiment was half successful: I still reached my goal of 600 calories.

    The real test remained: an hour after the workout, how would my shoulder feel?

    I showered, ate lunch, did some mild isometrics for my shoulder, and did not experience the shooting nerve pain I had a week earlier, so perhaps I was in the clear with the Airdyne provided I don’t row with my injured side.

    I would take this minor victory. The last three months I felt insulted by the difficulty in wrapping a towel around my waist, taking off a sweat-soaked tank top, putting on a belt, closing the driver-side car door, reaching for something in the back of the fridge, and using my left hand to soap my right armpit. Being able to burn 600 calories on the Airdyne was a sweet morsel of consolation. 

    In this war with a rotator cuff injury, I was willing to take whatever tiny victories I could get. 

    A small expression of gratitude might help my morose disposition and the self-pity that I had indulged in over the last three months. If I ever were to write and publish a book on my ordeal, I would probably title it Shoulder, Interrupted: How a Torn Rotator Cuff Tried to Break Me. 

  • Hope in the Form of a Lab Coat

    Hope in the Form of a Lab Coat

    For three months I slogged through shoulder pain armed with nothing but a self-diagnosis and stubborn pride. I refused to see a doctor. Why submit myself to some exhausted clinician who’d never lifted a kettlebell in his life and would prescribe the usual pablum—ice, rest, and advice I could have gotten from the comments section of Wikipedia?

    Then something happened that forced a reckoning. To compensate for the kettlebell exile, I doubled down on the Schwinn Airdyne—hour-long sessions of fan-bike misery that combine pedaling with lever rowing. I felt no pain… until a week before Thanksgiving. After a brutally satisfying session, a nerve fired down my arm like a live wire. The message was unmistakable: I had graduated from “irritation” to “we’re-squeezing-your-spinal-cord-for-fun.” Something was pinched, something was furious, and it was no longer optional.

    I made a YouTube video to announce the cosmic irony: my watch addiction was cured, but the cure was a torn rotator cuff. The floodgates opened. Dozens of comments poured in from people who had endured surgeries, magnets, injections, cortisone cocktails, or endless physical therapy. One old friend emailed: ten years of chronic pain, zero recovery, restricted motion for life. The road, it turns out, is paved with hope and ends in a ditch.

    It was clear: I didn’t need more voices, I needed data. I called Kaiser and booked an appointment. Someone would see me the day before Thanksgiving.

    That afternoon I met Dr. Cherukuri, a woman in her late thirties with the energy of someone who actually likes her profession. She examined my shoulder, commented that the bulge was visible even through my T-shirt, pressed around the joint, put me through a series of movements, and diagnosed left rotator cuff syndrome with left biceps tendinopathy. She ordered X-rays and an ultrasound and, pending results, believed three months of rehab could put me back together.

    She put me on Motrin three times a day for two weeks to bring the inflammation down—enough to make rehab possible. She also agreed I should continue kettlebell work for muscle maintenance. A doctor who understands the importance of preserving muscle mass? I nearly wept. The catch was predictable: no chest or shoulder presses, no biceps curls. My hypertrophy would be confined to legs, glutes, traps—maybe some trickle-down gains from rehab exercises if the gods were kind.

    She handed me a list of movements, which I combined with ones I learned from YouTube: cow-cat yoga pose, broomstick flexion, wall push-ups, wall flexion, forearm planks, plank shoulder taps, narrow-position knee push-ups, light dumbbell rotations, and more. Anything that required me to lift my arms overhead or behind me felt like sticking my shoulder into a hornet nest.

    The mandate was fifteen minutes of rehab every day. On kettlebell days, I’d slip the movements between lifts three days a week. The other four days were rehabilitation only—an entire week built around mending the wounded joint.

    Psychologically, the appointment was a relief. First, the diagnosis proved I wasn’t a lunatic or some melodramatic malingerer. Second, I needed structure. I needed a plan, a weapon—something to push against instead of drifting through pain, anxiety, and the unknowable. When I’m saddled with a problem, I don’t need platitudes; I need targets and artillery. Seeing the doctor was the moment I picked up a rifle instead of a white flag.

    But I was still blind. I had no idea how severe the tear was, whether rehab would work, whether I could heal without surgery, or how to navigate the distress of shoulder pain so sharp that turning my steering wheel wrong or sliding a backpack strap across my arm sent shockwaves that lingered for minutes.

    Going to a doctor was a necessary first step. But I still knew nothing. All I understood was how much I still needed to know if I hoped to climb out of this hole. The thirst for clarity, for diagnostic certainty, became my new obsession—one that bulldozed my watch addiction.

    My YouTube followers were devastated.
    “We need you back, bro. We need you to commiserate with us about the watch madness.”

    God bless them. They needed me to get better—not only for me, but for them, so we could suffer together in peace.

  • A Cure Worse Than the Disease

    A Cure Worse Than the Disease

    Be careful what you wish for. I spent twenty years begging the universe to cure my watch obsession, one that caused me to blow several thousand dollars a year on diver watches I’d unbox for my YouTube followers, flip, rebuy, and then sell again—a watch-obsessive’s fever dream. For twenty years, I tried to get off the hamster wheel of crazy, but the powers of social media and diver-watch eye candy kept pulling me back in.

    I finally got my cure: a torn rotator cuff. In late August of 2025, I remember lying on my back and doing single-arm, 50-pound kettlebell presses. I didn’t feel anything severe, just a tightness in my left shoulder.

    The next day, my left shoulder felt like a disgruntled rental car—everything squeaked, nothing moved smoothly, and I dreaded putting my arm through a sleeve.

    I knew what a torn rotator cuff felt like. I’d had them in both shoulders three times in my life. The first was when I was a thirteen-year-old Olympic weightlifter. On a rainy day in PE, the teacher, Mr. Bishop, had us play “volleyball” with a giant 72-inch Earth Ball, and when I tried to hit it with my right arm, the arm went backward and I was out of weightlifting for nine months.

    In the mid-nineties and early two-thousands, it happened twice more during heavy bench presses. Both occurrences took about nine months to heal.

    So I knew what I was dealing with. Usually, I’d need nine months.

    Of course, I had to modify my workouts into physical therapy sessions where I stare at resistance bands as if they’re punishment devices from a Stalin-era prison camp.

    The pain seemed to be more intense after workouts. I thought of ditching them altogether, but I read that no activity could lead to muscular atrophy and render the shoulder frozen and immobile. I wasn’t sure, though. How big and deep was the tear? Was my age—now 64—a factor working against me? Why did the rehab exercises performed by medical doctors on YouTube make my shoulder feel worse?

    These questions took up all my mental bandwidth, rendering my watch obsession nil. Wanting a healthy shoulder, I would gladly trade every diver, every limited edition, every bracelet and waffle strap for a shoulder that didn’t scream like a violin in a garbage disposal. So yes—my addiction was cured. Unfortunately, the cure was worse than the disease.

  • Anatomy of a Rotator Cuff Meltdown

    Anatomy of a Rotator Cuff Meltdown

    A torn rotator cuff doesn’t just hurt—it becomes the project manager of your mood swings and mental health. Every everyday gesture gets interrogated like a crime scene: How high can I raise this arm? Which angle is the assassin? When will the orthopedic surgeon enter stage left and demand a sacrificial tendon? You find yourself mentally policing every muscle fiber in the chest, shoulders, and biceps—formerly your prized territories, now embargoed like Cold War no-man’s lands. And then comes the flashback reel: Was it the single-arm kettlebell press? The swing? The curl? Maybe it wasn’t a heroic injury at all, just the slow, bureaucratic decay of connective tissue over time—aging’s signature insult.

    The constant vigilance is corrosive. Shoulder injuries have support groups because sufferers eventually learn the catastrophic secret: it’s not the rotator cuff that breaks first—it’s the psyche. The shoulder, like the back and knees, is a psychological choke point. When it fails, it takes your mood, your sleep, and your sense of invincibility hostage. Physical rehab becomes inseparable from emotional rehab. The body limps, and the mind limps with it, muttering under its breath.

    It’s been three months and I’m starting to resent the job of being my own orthopedic babysitter. I’m grateful I can still sleep without feeling like someone is driving a railroad spike through my scapula. I have enough forward and lateral mobility to get dressed without a prayer circle. I can still train legs, glutes, and abs like a functioning primate. But the lesson is brutal: a torn rotator cuff grants no mercy, no sanctuary from overthinking, and no reprieve from the quieter forms of psychological sabotage.

    A torn rotator cuff is no country for sniveling, navel-gazing men. The challenge now is to un-snivel, un-navel-gaze, and rebuild myself without the luxury of denial.

  • How a Tetanus Shot Turned Me Into Hamlet

    How a Tetanus Shot Turned Me Into Hamlet

    Chronic injuries make cowards of us all. The moment something snaps, pinches, or throbs, we become amateur radiologists, WebMD addicts, and midnight correspondents to our favorite AI oracle. Two days ago, I was diagnosed with left rotator cuff syndrome and left biceps tendinopathy. The ultrasound is five weeks away, a kind of orthopedic oracle reading, to determine whether the gods demand surgery. I followed the physical therapist’s rehab routine like a monk honoring scripture, only to feel soreness not just in the injured shoulder, but the good one as well. Suddenly, I was a man with two defective meat hooks, staring down the possibility of losing the ability to open a jar or button a shirt. Too little rehab, my shoulder would ossify into frozen stone; too much rehab, the tendons would “retract,” that satanic verb whispered in dark orthopedic circles—also leading to surgery. The tightrope was killing me. I imagined myself as a doomed invalid, a useless patriarch who had to ask his teenage daughters to help him put on socks.

    This morning I drove to the Honda dealership, handed over the keys, and walked home for my “workout,” earbuds piping KCRW’s Left, Right & Center into my ears. As I trudged past the familiar storefronts on Hawthorne Boulevard and spotted that the Chinese restaurant had been replaced by an IHOP, a revelation struck: the soreness in my right shoulder wasn’t from rehab. It was from the tetanus shot I’d gotten the same day as my diagnosis. The universe wasn’t collapsing—just my sense of proportion. In an instant I went from doomed cripple to idiot hypochondriac, humbled by the absurdity of my own catastrophizing.

    To add insult to ego, I’d been treating this like a heroic ordeal. At Thanksgiving, my brother-in-law mentioned his own rotator cuff—65% torn, surgery, sling, brutal rehab—and he endured it without turning it into a Greek tragedy. Meanwhile, I recorded a video describing my plight and dozens of fellow sufferers flooded the comments with horror stories of two-year recoveries, cortisone injections, and pain that made sleep a myth. So now I’m trying to regain perspective, to tighten my armor and “gird up thy loins like a man,” as the biblical thunderbolt commands.

    Easier said than done.

  • The Rotator Cuff, the Honda Dealership, and the Human Soul

    The Rotator Cuff, the Honda Dealership, and the Human Soul

    Life has a way of mocking our plans. You stride in with a neat blueprint, and the universe responds by flinging marbles under your feet. My shoulder rehab, for instance, was supposed to be a disciplined, daily ritual: the holy grail of recovering from a torn rotator cuff. Instead, after one enthusiastic session, both shoulders flared with the kind of throbbing soreness reserved for muscles resurrected from the dead (though after walking home from Honda, it occurred to me that my right shoulder soreness is probably the result of a tetanus shot). So much for the doctor’s handouts of broomstick rotations and wall flexions. Today, the new fitness plan is modest: drop off the Honda for service, walk two miles home, and declare that my workout. Tomorrow: to be determined by the whims of my tendons and sore muscles.

    Teaching is no different. I’ve written my entire Spring 2026 curriculum, but then I read about humanities professor Alan Jacobs—our pedagogical monk—who has ditched computers entirely. Students handwrite every assignment in composition books; they read photocopied essays with wide margins, scribbling annotations in ink. According to Jacobs, with screens removed and the “LLM demons” exorcised, students rediscover themselves as human beings. They think again. They care again. I can see the appeal. They’re no longer NPCs feeding essays into the AI maw.

    But then I remembered who I am. I’m not a parchment-and-fountain-pen professor any more than I’m a pure vegan. I am a creature of convenience, pragmatism, and modern constraints. My students live in a world of laptops, apps, and algorithms; teaching them only quills and notebooks would be like handing a medieval knight a lightsaber and insisting he fight with a broomstick. I will honor authenticity another way—through the power of my prompts, the relevance of my themes, and the personal narratives that force students to confront their own thoughts rather than outsource them. My job is to balance the human soul with the tools of the age, not to bury myself—and my students—in nostalgia cosplay.

  • Buckwheat, Tofu, and Ethical Whey: My Daily Protein Math

    Buckwheat, Tofu, and Ethical Whey: My Daily Protein Math

    To soften the financial blow of switching from Optimum Nutrition whey (about 65 cents an ounce) to the “humane” NorCal Organic whey (a daunting $2.03 an ounce), I’m considering a strategic compromise: one scoop instead of two. Instead of treating protein powder like a dietary life raft, I would reserve it solely for breakfast—mixed into my buckwheat groats with hemp hearts and walnuts. Lunch would shift toward an ancient-grain base like millet paired with tofu, nutritional yeast, almonds, pumpkin seeds, and a rotating cast of sauces—tomato, bruschetta, Thai curry, smoked ancho seasoning—plus a vegetable anchor of broccoli, zucchini, or arugula. Dinner could mirror lunch or simply be whatever my wife makes. 

    Between those meals, I’d supplement with a cup of Greek yogurt topped with berries and walnuts. The protein math looks surprisingly robust: about 50 grams at breakfast, 50 grams at lunch, 20 grams in the afternoon snack, and another 50 grams at dinner—170 grams total. Calories sit comfortably around 2,400. 

    If the plan holds, I would hit my macros while keeping animal products to a minimum and reserving them for the two sources I actually respect: ethically sourced whey and cultured dairy. Maybe this arrangement will allow me to maintain muscle without feeling like I’m subsidizing factory-farm horrors—an uneasy détente between performance goals and conscience.

  • A “Simple Neighborhood Walk” is a Hellscape

    A “Simple Neighborhood Walk” is a Hellscape

    This morning in a desperate attempt to avoid aggravating my left torn rotator cuff, I tried to replace my Schwinn Airdyne (rowing levers are forbidden) with a morning walk. The math was simple: one hour on foot would supposedly burn 350 calories, which is laughable next to the 600 I incinerate in 55 minutes on the Airdyne. 

    But the moment I stepped outside, I realized something grim: walking is not exercise—it’s a social gauntlet. First, the bucket hat. Nothing makes a grown man feel like a middle-school tourist quite like a floppy nylon dome that broadcasts fear of UV rays and impending melanoma. Then there were the stranger-encounter dilemmas: do I wave? Pretend I didn’t see them? Stare intensely at the sidewalk like a serial killer? Cars drifted past, exhaling pollution like dragons, stray dogs threatened to lunge out of nowhere, and my lower back nagged like an unhappy union organizer. Worst of all was the boredom. I can’t sink into an Audible book because every twenty seconds I’m distracted by another irritant: barking, brake squeals, wind, a rogue sprinkler system. I need cardio for my kettlebell off-days, but outdoor walking feels like punishment—exercise mixed with psychological warfare. So I’m looking inward: step-ups on my 18-inch exercise stool, medicine ball squats, Romanian deadlifts, farmer’s carries, yoga poses that don’t summon the devil into my rotator cuff, and the rehab routine prescribed by my sports doctor. After 50 years of working out, I’ve learned one law more sacred than the Ten Commandments: if I don’t enjoy it, I won’t do it. So the walking era is dead. A new battle plan has begun.

  • A Diagnosis is a Weapon: My First Step Toward Shoulder Recovery

    A Diagnosis is a Weapon: My First Step Toward Shoulder Recovery

    Yesterday I met with a sports medicine physical therapist at Kaiser for the first time. The kind nurse took my vitals, and to my surprise my blood pressure wasn’t bad at all: 127 over 84. My blood pressure always spikes a bit at the doctor’s. 

    Then I met the sports doctor. She was affable, direct, and clearly passionate about her work. She examined my left shoulder, noted that the swelling was visible even through my T-shirt, pressed along the biceps groove, and tested my range of motion. After watching me perform several movements, she diagnosed me with rotator cuff syndrome and biceps tendinopathy. She immediately ordered an X-ray (results pending) and scheduled an ultrasound in five weeks to gather more detail. 

    Her initial verdict was cautiously optimistic: with proper rehab, she believes I can recover in three months. I told her that unlike my old gym injury—when I tore my rotator cuff doing heavy bench presses and spent nine months in purgatory—this one didn’t begin with trauma. I was simply doing my normal kettlebell chest presses, felt a little tightness, and woke up the next morning with a shoulder that felt like it belonged to someone else. That incident was three months ago. 

    She has me on Motrin three times a day to bring down the inflammation so I can tolerate the rehab movements. To my relief, she didn’t ask me to abandon muscle training; she understands the realities of aging and the need to protect lean mass. I just have to avoid chest presses, shoulder presses, and curls. My work will shift to legs, glutes, traps, and lat activation, with shoulder and pec stimulation coming indirectly through rehab. She gave a handout of exercises, some I can do and others I can’t. I also consulted some doctors who do shoulder rehab on YouTube and told her about some, and she agreed I could do them.

    So far, I have a long list of rehab exercises I can choose from: cat–cow yog pose, broomstick flexion, wall push-ups, wall flexion, planks, plank taps, narrow push-ups on the knees, light dumbbell rotations, and others. 

    Some overhead movements are currently impossible. Hanging from a chin-up bar, the internet’s magic cure, feels like medieval torture. 

    I’ll do the exercises that I can tolerate for fifteen minutes daily: integrated on kettlebell days, standalone on the rest. Also, on my non-kettlebell days, the doctor agrees I should take an hour-long walk.

    Psychologically, this appointment mattered. A diagnosis means I’m not inventing pain or collapsing mentally. It gives me a plan, an organizing principle, a weapon. When my body fails, I can live with discomfort; what I cannot tolerate is drifting in uncertainty. Seeing this doctor was the first step in taking back control.

  • Three Months of Shoulder Pain and the Art of Not Panicking

    Three Months of Shoulder Pain and the Art of Not Panicking

    This afternoon I’ll see a doctor about my three-month shoulder ordeal. I’m hoping for clarity: bursitis or a torn rotator cuff. The injury didn’t begin with a dramatic moment. I remember doing single-arm chest presses on the garage mat with a 50-pound kettlebell. There was a subtle tightness in the left shoulder—no alarm bells. The next morning I woke as if someone had rearranged the joint overnight. Side raises and reaching behind became nearly impossible. I cut out all chest and shoulder presses. Some days the pain flared after training; I blamed curls and single-arm swings, so I eliminated them too, and the pain eased.

    To make up for the reduced kettlebell volume, I doubled down on the Schwinn Airdyne, grinding through hour-long sessions that combine pedaling and lever rowing. No pain—until three days ago, when the movement set off a nerve fire down my arm. That told me I was no longer dealing with simple irritation. Something was pinched and inflamed. The bike is now retired. I’ll walk the neighborhood for cardio until further notice. I’ve experimented with rehab exercises: cat-cow yoga poses help; so do wall push-ups from shoulder rehab videos. Side lateral raises, though medically recommended, feel like sabotage. I refuse them.

    I made a video about the injury yesterday. The floodgates opened. Dozens of comments from people who had surgery, magnets, injections, or long stretches of physical therapy. One old friend emailed: he never recovered and has lived with pain and restricted motion for a decade. The road, it seems, is long and indifferent to optimism. I don’t enjoy the pain, the limited workouts, or the hypervigilance required to avoid reinjury. The mental effort—combined with physical discomfort—wears me down. Right now the shoulder aches at a low level, probably from the idiotic attempt to sling on a backpack this morning. Starting next week, I’m switching to a messenger bag over my healthy shoulder.

    When I speak to the doctor today, I’ll try to be calm, give a clear narrative, and resist letting anxiety pull me into melodrama. I want to hear the data, not force my fantasy of “no surgery” onto the facts. I had hoped to write about something else this morning—anything other than this shoulder—but obsession has its own gravity. It will not be ignored.