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Thread: Road to Recovery

  1. #1
    Member
    Join Date
    Feb 2011
    Location
    Utah

    Road to Recovery

    After orthopedic surgery on my right shoulder and on my right elbow followed by long and painful PT and home exercise regimine I am finally returning to shooting. I never really gave it up as I continued going to the range and practiced WHO shooting. Working with a SIRT pistol at home I finally felt I was ready to try shooting right handed again. Went out to the range and shot the Bullseye 3 way on a B16 target at 25 Yards.

    I started with WHO:

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    Not bad, feeling pretty good so far so let's try two hand:

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    Hey, I'm pretty good at this! Won't take me long to get back to shooting some matches. Can't wait to see how SHO shooting goes:

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    WTF! Four misses? I suck. My hand was shaking so bad that the front sight was just a blur out there. My grip strength is far worse than I expected considering all the work I have put into building up some strength in my right arm and hand. Also, my shoulder was surprisingly sore the next day.

    Definitely need to step up with the home exercises and dry fire and see if I can get a handle on this. Anybody else here who has gone through this sort of thing have any suggestions for rebuilding shooting skills?

    I think I was able to forget some bad habits with the time off from shooting and working on WHO shooting forced me to return to the fundamentals. Just need to find the easiest way to get my right arm working at 100% again.

  2. #2
    How long since your surgery? I fell on ice and messed up my shoulder. I just did rehab. I didn't need surgery. It was a year before I felt my shoulder and shooting were back to normal. I found that just shooting was a good rehab plan. I shot a G-19 rather than a G-17 for a while because it was easier to draw.

  3. #3
    Member
    Join Date
    Feb 2011
    Location
    Utah
    Shoulder surgery was August 2016 and the elbow was July 2017. The shoulder was a mess. I had a complete tear in the rotator cuff and the labrum had separated completely from the collar bone. While they were in there they removed some impingements and old scar tissue. The elbow was a pretty straightforward tendo release with a few other minor repairs.

  4. #4
    Site Supporter
    Join Date
    Mar 2011
    Location
    West Virginia
    Been there. A year of PT didn't seem to help much when it came to shooting. The thing that worked was getting the reps in with a pistol, both dry and live fire. My support hand grip strength is still terrible and almost a year after ending my shoulder PT I'm just now able to really do some serious grip work.

    In the long run I think the injury will be a blessing in disguise. Having the grip strength of a twelve year old girl has made me put a lot of work into controlling the gun with technique, and even though I'm currently working out with 80# grippers the gun is staying flatter and settling back on target better than when I was working out with the 150#'s.

  5. #5
    Member
    Join Date
    Feb 2011
    Location
    Utah
    I saw the orthopedic surgeon for a follow up on my elbow the other day. Elbow is recovering quickly but he had checked my left arm and had some tests done and now I am scheduled for surgery on my left wrist. Can't. Effing. Win. Getting old sucks.
    Last edited by Corey; 10-29-2017 at 12:10 AM.

  6. #6
    Site Supporter
    Join Date
    Mar 2011
    Location
    West Virginia
    Laser treatment helped during my recovery. I always felt a lot better after PT when I got the treatment compared to days I didn't. Might be worth asking your doc or physical therapist about.

  7. #7
    My wife has had two knee surgeries,(acl and meniscus), carpal tunnel surgery, (wrist), a spinal fusion, and one rotator cuff/reattach bicep surgery, the other shoulder was a more simple clean up of her rotator cuff. Over the years I have broken both tibias, one wrist, 2 ribs and had minucus surgery on a knee. Far and away, nothing is as painful or takes as long to recover from than shoulder surgery.

    In my experience any orthopedic surgery takes at least a full year to get back to anything near normal. Longer to get past the mental, 'I need to favor/protect this limb' thing.

    Your PT therapist should become your best friend. The more PT you do, the better your long term range of motion and over all recovery will be. If you're past insurance coverage for PT, keep doing the exersises at home, and pay for a session once a month to keep you on track.

    Keep positive. In a few years you'll be pysched you took care of these things back when you were young.
    Last edited by Alembic; 11-01-2017 at 07:01 PM.

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