Cinemorphosis

Tag: workout

  • Pumping Iron Against the Dying Light

    Pumping Iron Against the Dying Light

    The desire to work out in the garage with weights, mostly kettlebells for the last two decades, has not abated as I close in on my sixty-fifth birthday. There is no voice inside me saying, “Someday you will hang up your leather workout gloves.” I embrace the workout grind with undying enthusiasm. I remember reading a bodybuilding magazine in the 70s and coming across a quote from a champion bodybuilder: “I’m going to keep training as long as God allows me to breathe.” I’m on the same page. Working out is not an option. It’s as essential as breathing.

    I have to assume that since my first workout in 1974, I’ve been getting a dopamine fix from these training sessions, resulting in stress relief. I have to assume working out is my way of managing anxiety and depression. I have to assume my workouts are addictive in their own right. If I miss a workout, I feel so ungrounded that I become unbearable to myself and others. This makes vacations a challenge. What’s supposed to be a time of stress relief becomes a stress bomb.

    Working out for an hour a day is not just about carving out an hour for exercise. It’s about creating an entire routine built around that hour. The feedings, the naps, the piano, the writing, the creative work, and the chores all revolve around the 10 a.m. workout.

    So the Happy Place, as people might call it, is not just the garage, where the alchemy of resistance and sweat takes place while a radio tuned to news talk hums in the background. It’s the entire daily routine.

    Essential to this routine, after the workout shower and feeding, is the nap. I am so spent after a workout that I demand sixty minutes flat on my back with noise-canceling headphones and one of my favorite podcasts before waking up and having my yogurt bowl. Without that nap, I would not be able to go on for the rest of the day. Something is taken away from me during that morning workout. Something is given back to me after that afternoon nap.

    I am more than a hopeless workout guy. I am a hopeless nostalgic workout guy. My heart is not just in the gym. It’s in an era. I’m talking about the 70s, the only bodybuilding age I connect with. In my mind, I am training and eating protein bars with Arnold, Draper, Zane, Mentzer, Oliva, Nubret, and others. I am tanning with the greats on Venice Beach and talking about preacher curls, donkey raises, and hack squats until the orange sun sets in the salmon sky. I am connected with others, the dream of eternal youth, and the Life Force.

    Man does not live on bread alone. He lives on myth. I find solace in entering a 70s portal where I am a well-preserved Adonis consuming protein bowls and nutritional shakes. I am reminded of one of John Cheever’s most famous short stories, “The Swimmer.” Aged and washed-up, the main character, Neddy Merrill, decides to swim a chain of swimming pools, which he imagines as the Lucinda River, to travel from a distant house to his home. He imagines himself as a pilgrim embarked on a quest to achieve mythic glory. But all his self-mythologizing distracts him from the brutal fact that his selfish and alcoholic ways have severed his ties with family and friends. He returns to a home that is boarded up and empty.

    Looking at this cautionary tale, I must remind myself that workouts are no panacea. My dependence on them and the routines that surround them can make me more self-absorbed than is healthy for me and my family. But in many ways, it’s too late to go back. When I started working out at thirteen and a few years later saw Arnold and other legends in the movie Pumping Iron, I crossed some invisible Rubicon from which there would be no return.

  • The Torn Rotator Cuff That Taught Me Gratitude

    The Torn Rotator Cuff That Taught Me Gratitude

    In late August of 2025, I tore my left rotator cuff.

    It wasn’t my first encounter with the injury. I had damaged the same shoulder in the 1990s and again in the early 2000s while chasing bigger bench presses. Those injuries announced themselves with unmistakable violence. I felt the shoulder give way beneath the weight, and in that instant I knew exactly what I had done.

    This time was different.

    During my kettlebell workout, nothing seemed wrong. No sharp pain. No alarming pop. No dramatic warning that I had crossed a line.

    The verdict arrived the following morning.

    I woke to a shoulder that had quietly mutinied overnight.

    The culprit wasn’t one reckless repetition but accumulated stupidity. At sixty-three, I had somehow convinced myself that five heavy kettlebell workouts every week was a sensible training program. My rotator cuff politely disagreed.

    I saw an orthopedic specialist, received the diagnosis, and was offered surgery.

    I declined.

    Instead, I committed myself to physical therapy. Resistance bands replaced heavy iron. Tiny, almost laughably simple exercises became my daily ritual. Progress came not in dramatic breakthroughs but in stubborn millimeters. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, I climbed out of rotator cuff purgatory.

    Ten months later, the pain is gone.

    My range of motion has returned.

    I wake without the familiar ache that once greeted me every morning.

    Most importantly, I never needed surgery.

    At sixty-four, I consider that outcome a gift.

    Even so, I no longer pretend the injury never happened.

    It changed me.

    First, I accept that my shoulder probably isn’t what it once was. I no longer possess the same explosive confidence during overhead presses and kettlebell thrusters. Rather than arguing with reality, I simply reach for lighter weights.

    Second, I train less often and recover more. Three kettlebell workouts each week are enough. I insist on at least twenty-four hours between resistance sessions, particularly those involving my upper body. On the days in between, I happily climb aboard my exercise bike for an hour of steady cardio.

    Third, I have abandoned my fascination with heavier numbers. Rows, swings, goblet squats—everything has become lighter. Instead of chasing personal records, I chase rhythm, consistency, and smooth movement. My joints have become more valuable to me than my ego.

    Finally, I’ve learned to exercise with gratitude.

    For decades I treated workouts as obligations or competitions. Now they feel more like privileges. Every pain-free session reminds me that movement is something to appreciate rather than assume. Respect has replaced bravado. Caution has replaced impatience.

    Looking back, I feel as though I dodged a bullet.

    The outcome wasn’t perfect. My shoulder carries its history with it, and so do I.

    But I also can’t ignore the alternative futures that never arrived. Surgery never came. Chronic pain never settled in. Permanent disability never took hold.

    Instead, I recovered about as well as a man could reasonably hope after fifty-two years of asking his body to lift heavy things and three months before his sixty-fifth birthday.

    That realization has changed my definition of strength.

    Strength is no longer measured by the amount of weight hanging from a kettlebell.

    It is measured by the wisdom to keep showing up tomorrow.

  • Chasing Nirvana on the Misery Machine

    Chasing Nirvana on the Misery Machine

    For the past three years, I have climbed aboard the Schwinn Airdyne AD7—better known in my household as the Misery Machine—two or three times a week for fifty to sixty minutes. It complements my three weekly kettlebell workouts by providing just enough suffering to convince me that my life choices deserve constant reevaluation. On a typical ride I burn between 600 and 750 calories. About once a month I have a monster workout that sails past 800 calories. About once a month I have the opposite experience, when my body feels as though it has been poured full of wet concrete and refuses every command I issue. On those days I wave the white flag around the 500-calorie mark.

    The workouts embody the old saying, “It hurts so good,” though that cliché hardly captures what actually happens. On my best days, the ride unfolds in two distinct psychological stages that I have come to call Nirvana I and Nirvana II.

    Nirvana I usually arrives around the 400-calorie mark, roughly thirty to thirty-three minutes into the workout. By then my shirt has surrendered completely to perspiration. Sweat drips from my elbows, pools beneath the bike, and convinces any reasonable observer that the plumbing has failed. My breathing settles into a steady rhythm, the static disappears from my mind, and I feel as though I have been lowered into a warm bath of endorphins. The outside world recedes. My obligations disappear. There is only the machine and me. About eighty percent of my workouts reach this stage.

    Nirvana II is another matter entirely.

    It cannot be scheduled, negotiated, or bullied into existence. It appears only on those rare mornings when physiology, mood, sleep, and providence decide to cooperate. I continue sweating rivers, but fatigue never quite catches me. My cadence remains smooth. My breathing stays controlled. Instead of counting down the remaining minutes, I begin believing absurd things.

    “I’m unstoppable.”

    The Misery Machine no longer owns me.

    I own it.

    The fan roars. My legs keep driving. Every revolution of the pedals reinforces the illusion that I have temporarily escaped the ordinary laws of aging and entropy. For twenty glorious minutes I become convinced I could ride forever. Nirvana II is the Holy Grail of my fitness life. It is the workout equivalent of pitching a perfect game.

    Unfortunately, every heaven has its corresponding hell.

    I call it Shut Down.

    Unlike Nirvana, Shut Down announces itself almost immediately. Within the first fifteen minutes I can tell something is wrong. My breathing becomes shallow. My legs feel leaden. The usual RPMs suddenly resemble Olympic qualifying standards. Every minute feels borrowed.

    Years of yoga have taught me not to argue with these days.

    When Shut Down arrives, resistance is futile. I simply acknowledge reality.

    “Today is not my day.”

    I lower the intensity, keep pedaling, and allow my body to dictate the terms of surrender. Most Shut Down workouts end around forty minutes and 450 calories. They leave me discouraged, though experience has taught me not to overreact. Ninety-nine percent of the time the next workout restores me to normal, as though my body merely needed to remind me who actually runs the operation.

    Oddly enough, the existence of Nirvana II is what keeps drawing me back.

    Every workout carries the possibility of discovering that elusive state again. It is exercise’s version of Christmas morning. Will today be the day? Will I feel invincible? Will I conquer the Misery Machine instead of merely surviving it?

    I never know.

    That uncertainty is precisely what makes me keep climbing back aboard.

  • The Day the Gym Lost Its Soul–and I Took Mine Back

    The Day the Gym Lost Its Soul–and I Took Mine Back

    The gym in the 1970s was my holy temple. Not the antiseptic, glass-and-chrome shrines of today, but something closer to a workshop for men trying to hammer themselves into existence. The places I trained were rough, honest, and gloriously indifferent to appearances. No mood lighting. No eucalyptus towels. Just iron, sweat, and a shared work ethic.

    There were relics, of course, absurd contraptions left over from the Eisenhower years. Chief among them: the fat-jiggling machine. You strapped a belt around your waist or backside, flipped a switch, and the machine vibrated you like a malfunctioning appliance. The promise was surgical fat loss. The reality was public humiliation. No one touched it. To be seen using that thing was social suicide, a one-way ticket to pariah status. Even as teenagers, we understood that dignity had weight, and that machine stripped it from you ounce by ounce.

    Everything else, though, was perfect. The equipment did its job. The atmosphere did more. You could spend three hours there and feel cheated when you had to leave.

    Then came the 80s and 90s, and the gym got a facelift and a personality disorder. Out went grit; in came gloss. Chrome multiplied. Music was no longer background; it was an assault. Televisions blinked from every angle like slot machines. Smoothie bars appeared, as if protein needed to be accessorized. Personal trainers hovered, predatory, unctuous, and overfamiliar, radiating a kind of rehearsed enthusiasm that made you want to check your wallet.

    I tolerated the spectacle because I had no alternative. I didn’t have a garage full of equipment. The gym, vulgar as it had become, still held a monopoly on my routine. I assumed I’d be there until my dying breath.

    Then, in 2005, at an LA Fitness in Torrance, the illusion cracked. I noticed I was getting sick constantly—four, five colds a year. The common denominator wasn’t mysterious. It was the sauna, that damp Petri dish where strangers exhaled their pathogens in communal harmony. Add to that the blaring music, the social butterflies mistaking gossip for training, and the creeping sense that the place had become a theater of distraction rather than discipline—and I was done. The gym hadn’t betrayed me. It had simply revealed what it had become.

    So I left.

    In my early forties, I had no interest in bulking up. Call it instinct, call it desperation. Whatever it was, it pushed me toward power yoga DVDs. Bryan Kest and Rodney Yee became unlikely guides. I loved the sessions: the control, the focus, the quiet authority of breath over chaos. But yoga had a ceiling. Four to five hundred calories an hour wasn’t enough to outrun my appetite. If I lived on lentils, tofu, moong beans, and restraint, maybe. I didn’t.

    So by 2007, I pivoted to kettlebells.

    That wasn’t a compromise. It was a revelation.

    Kettlebells gave me intensity—eight hundred calories an hour—and something else the gym had quietly drained from me: engagement. Swings, squats, farmer’s carries were simple movements with endless variation. Enough complexity to keep boredom at bay, enough brutality to keep me honest. Nearly twenty years later, I’m still at it.

    And here’s the part no one advertises: I stopped getting sick. The revolving door of colds vanished. The gym, it turns out, had been taxing me in ways I hadn’t fully accounted for. Walking away from it wasn’t just a change in venue; it was a correction.

    Training at home became more than convenience. It became control. No membership fees. No commute. No background noise of other people’s trivialities. Just the work, stripped down to its essentials. I had removed friction where it didn’t belong and kept it where it mattered.

    That’s the difference between a real life hack and a counterfeit one.

    A real life hack replaces the original with something equal or superior. A counterfeit gives you convenience at the cost of substance, then flatters you into believing nothing was lost. My kettlebell training didn’t dilute the gym experience; it surpassed it. It demanded more precision, more coordination, more accountability. No machines to guide you. No rails to hide behind. Just you, the weight, and gravity’s indifference.

    This morning, I found myself studying kettlebell variations on YouTube—stop-start swings, double front squats—scribbling notes with the enthusiasm of a kid circling toys in a catalog. The same pulse I get when I spot a new Seiko Monster or Casio G-Shock release: anticipation, possibility, a little irrational excitement.

    Today is supposed to be an Airdyne day. An hour on the Schwinn, steady and predictable. But the kettlebells are calling. I know better than to give in. Experience has taught me the discipline of alternating days and sparing my joints, but the urge is there, insistent, almost childish.

    That’s how I know I’ve done something right.

    When your “discipline” starts to feel like anticipation, that’s not a workaround.

    That’s a life recalibrated.

  • The No-Watch Zone

    The No-Watch Zone

    Since early adolescence, I’ve belonged to physical culture. Training, lifting, macro-counting, controlled breathing—the rituals took hold when I was twelve and never left. My sacred spaces are wherever the work happens: the gym, the garage, the office corner cleared for punishment and repair. In these places I move iron, swing kettlebells, grind through bike intervals, and fold myself into the severe calm of power yoga. This is the body’s economy—strain, recovery, repeat.

    But I live another life as well.

    I live the timepiece life.

    Throughout the week I rotate watches the way other people rotate shoes. A watch completes the uniform. Without it, the day feels unfinished, like leaving the house without a belt or a sense of purpose.

    Eventually, anyone who inhabits both worlds confronts the same question:
    What watch do you wear when you train?

    My answer: none.

    I have no interest in marinating a watch in sweat until it develops the bouquet of a gym towel abandoned in a locker since the Bush administration. Yes, I’ve entertained the fantasy—the rugged masculinity of crushing a workout while a G-Shock absorbs the shock and the glory. But the fantasy fades quickly.

    Training, for me, is a No-Watch Zone.

    I wear a watch all day. I sleep with one. At some point, the wrist deserves parole. It needs air. It needs to remember what unmonitored existence feels like. Naked skin against the barbell. No weight, no strap, no quiet reminder of identity, status, or time itself.

    The No-Watch Zone is less a practical rule than a philosophical boundary. Sweat, strain, and the sharp chemistry of effort belong to the body alone, not to the artifact. Inside this space, there is no curation, no aesthetic, no signaling. Only breath, effort, fatigue, and the small private victory of continuing.

    And something unexpected happens.

    When the workout ends—shower taken, pulse settled—the act of putting the watch back on feels ceremonial. The wrist returns to civilization. The object regains its presence. Absence restores its meaning.

    Constant wear dulls a watch.

    A little separation makes it matter again.

  • Six Months with a Torn Rotator Cuff and a Reality Check

    Six Months with a Torn Rotator Cuff and a Reality Check

    Six months ago, I didn’t tear my left rotator cuff in a moment of heroism or catastrophe. There was no dramatic pop, no cinematic collapse. This was a slow, quiet betrayal—the accumulated result of too many kettlebell sessions, too much weight, and too few rest days. Overtraining doesn’t announce itself. It keeps a ledger. One day the bill comes due.

    The injury delivered more than pain. It delivered anxiety. Every movement carried a whisper of threat: one wrong reach, one careless angle, and the shoulder might unzip itself. I moved cautiously, slept poorly, and began a small, private relationship with fear. I visited the doctor, the physical therapist, and the ultrasound technician. I chose the conservative path—no MRI, no surgery—just the long road of rehab: light weights, resistance bands, patience.

    Subjectively, the progress is real. Mobility has improved. Pain has eased. I’d estimate I’m about 70 percent back. But the injury has one cruel habit: the 3 a.m. wake-up call of throbbing pain. Lying still is the enemy of a damaged shoulder. Arthritis settles in like a squatter. The strange irony is that movement helps. Blood flow is medicine. A light workout often feels better than rest, which violates every instinct you have when something hurts.

    The questions, however, remain. If full mobility returns in a few months, will the nighttime arthritis fade, or is this now part of the landscape? When I’m “healed,” does that mean I can return to moderate kettlebell presses, or is the future a permanent treaty with lighter loads and humility? Injury has a way of rewriting your contract with ambition.

    My current training schedule reflects that renegotiation: two kettlebell sessions, two power yoga sessions, and two rounds a week on the Schwinn Airdyne—the machine I’ve come to call the Misery Machine. Kettlebells and yoga feel like disciplined bliss. The Airdyne feels like punishment administered by a research facility with questionable ethics. I’m less a human being and more of a lab rat. I don’t exercise on it so much as survive it.

    If the bike is the physical grind, the real psychological battle is food. I know what to eat. I actually crave healthy food. My staples read like a nutritionist’s love letter: buckwheat groats, steel-cut oats, chia, hemp, pumpkin seeds, molasses, soy milk. High protein. High magnesium. Clean and intentional.

    The problem isn’t what I eat. It’s how much—and why. Food is how my family connects. A couple nights a week means takeout. Mendocino Farms sandwiches that arrive with the caloric density of a small planet. Bread, desserts, shared indulgence. These moments feel like love, and they also keep me about thirty pounds heavier than I’d like to be.

    There’s a hard truth here that no diet book can soften: you can’t pursue food like a hobby and expect to look like a fitness model. Appetite has consequences. Pleasure has a price. At some point you stop negotiating with reality, make your choices, accept the outcome, and move forward without the luxury of self-pity.

    The shoulder, at least, is improving. Slowly. Imperfectly. But better.

  • Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day, and Neither Was a Better Body

    Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day, and Neither Was a Better Body

    Five months into a rotator cuff injury, my left shoulder now runs a morning protest movement. Today it was particularly militant. The arthritis pain was so loud it drowned out my writing, which is saying something, because writing is usually where I go to escape pain, not negotiate with it.

    The solution, as usual, was humility. I picked up light dumbbells and did slow lateral raises—nothing heroic, nothing Instagram-worthy. Just enough movement to get blood into the joint and remind it that we are still partners, not enemies. The pain eased. Ibuprofen helped too, but I’ve learned the hard lesson: skip it for a day, let the inflammation throw a party, and it takes hours to evict the guests.

    Rotator cuff arthritis is a mechanical problem disguised as a moral one. When the joint isn’t tracking well, the socket gets irritated, and the irritation becomes inflammation. Night makes it worse. While you sleep, the synovial fluid thickens into something closer to cold syrup. Morning arrives, and the shoulder feels like a rusty hinge. The cure is movement—gentle, persistent, unglamorous movement. Every time I loosen it up, the joint forgives me a little.

    Training now looks less like conquest and more like diplomacy. Two kettlebell sessions a week, mostly lower body, with some shrugs and narrow-stance knee push-ups—just enough upper-body work to maintain function without provoking rebellion. Power yoga is back three days a week, a return to the early-2000s era of Bryan Kest and Rodney Yee, now supplemented by the Man Flow Yoga channel. I modify poses for the shoulder, but once I settle into the rhythm, the familiar state returns—the quiet, steady current of yoga flow. At this point, the mental repair may be more important than the physical.

    The Schwinn Airdyne—the Misery Machine—has been demoted to one day a week. Left unchecked, I turn cardio into a courtroom, constantly trying to beat yesterday’s calorie output. Competition with yourself sounds noble until it becomes another form of anxiety.

    Underneath all of this sits the larger ambition: weight loss through appetite discipline. Easier declared than achieved. Two nights ago I dreamed I wanted to be lean again but could only get there through GLP-1 drugs (which I’ve never taken). Such a dream is what your subconscious imagines when it has lost faith in your willpower. I’m hovering around 230—solid in a T-shirt, but without the narrower waist that signals to the world (and to my lab results) that discipline has the upper hand. For me, that line is about 210.

    Physical self-improvement is rarely about aesthetics alone. It’s an attempt to become the kind of person who can choose the long-term over the immediate—the kind of person who doesn’t negotiate with every craving. Discipline isn’t punishment. It’s the architecture of a calmer life.

    This question of belief came back to me while watching the documentary Queen of Chess, about Judit Polgar, who fought her way through a male-dominated chess world. Her advice was simple: you have to believe in yourself. The line landed harder than expected.

    But belief doesn’t arrive on command. If your history includes abandoned goals and broken dietary programs, confidence isn’t a mindset—it’s a construction project. It’s built the only way durable things are built: small wins, repeated often enough that the brain stops arguing.

    Rome wasn’t built in a day. Neither is a shoulder. Neither is a waist. Neither is a self you trust.

  • 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. 

  • 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.

  • Expiration Date, Please Hold

    Expiration Date, Please Hold

    I have been lifting longer than most marriages last. My barbell education began in 1974 at Earl Warren Junior High, when the world still smelled of gym chalk and cheap cologne. By twelve I was worshipping squats, chasing pec pumps, and counting out 200 grams of protein like it was scripture. Weightlifting wasn’t a hobby; it was a program for staying human in a chaotic world. Say what you will–and I will–but lifting saved me. Plain fact.

    Being a lifter has been a suite of advantages: I look younger than my driver’s license suggests, my muscular frame reads as backup insurance against chronic illnesses and wayward surgeons, and I can still train with a teenager’s ferocity. There is a chemical grace to it–the endorphin blast after a set that feels like a small, private resurrection. I am, frankly and proudly, a workout addict.

    But let’s not romanticize. Every addiction has its dark shadow. There will come a winter–perhaps in my eighties–when my body will send a clear memo: enough. The garage kettlebells I currently haul like battle standards will be too heavy, the Turkish Get-Up will turn into a consult with gravity. That prospect terrifies me because the kettlebell isn’t just steel and handle; it is a throttle on my will to live.

    We are all animated by different things. For me it is sweat, breath, the rattle of plates. For my old beloved Finnish Spitz, Gretchen, the decline arrived as a refusal of walks and food. When desire dies, everything else follows. So long as I rise hungry and ache for a workout, I count myself unexpired. When hunger and will fade, I suspect I’ll understand what Gretchen taught me without lectures, philosophy, or think pieces about aging in The Atlantic: the stopwatch of life has clicked.

    Am I foolish to have stapled my life to a routine of kettlebells and protein scoops? Have I mistaken the ritual for immortality? Maybe. Maybe I should cultivate other anchors–friends who aren’t gym bros, projects that don’t require a heart rate monitor. Or maybe I did the right thing: built a life that keeps me moving, thinking, and sufficiently irritable to remain alive.

    I don’t have the script for what comes after the iron thins. I’ve got the stubbornness to keep trying. If anyone’s got a convincing new plot, I’ll listen. Preferably between sets.