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Jessica is our 2016 Olympic Hopeful and Sarah is our 2012 Olympian in Weightlifting. We're setting out to be "Pretty Strong" and we encourage you to do the same.

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Thursday, March 28, 2013

Not Strong Enough for a Weightlifter

Weightlifters are tough people. We really take a pounding everyday. We say jokes like, "If it's good enough for a horse, it's good enough for me!" and "If it can sand wood, it'll probably be good and shaving my callouses down right?" Some of you strength and power sports might be able to relate to some of the way we do things around here.

*Can't afford a massage? Use a car buffer!



*Power Sander: Reduces Callouses
*Ibuprofen: "Do not exceed 6 tables in 24 hours." So taking 6 at a time, 3-4 times a day isn't good? Who needs a stomach or a liver anyway?
*Still in pain? Try DMSO. It's just a pain reliever for horses and makes your mouth taste like bad garlic. No big deal.
 
*Do your wrists hurt while lifting and regular wrist wraps won't do the job? Have a leather smith who makes horse saddles make you a pair.


Side story: Once we had a horse-leather smith- guy come to the gym so he could make me wrist wraps. He smelled terrible! But, that's besides the point. He measured my wrists a few days before Thanksgiving. He said he would have them ready by Friday. We were really impressed on how fast he would have them done with the holiday coming and all. Well, we never saw or heard from him ever again. He never called, e-mailed, or showed up. So we were left wondering what the heck happened. So we just made up jokes about how he had to have had a wrist fetish and ran his own website called, www.bigbeautifulwrists.com.

*Tow straps for weightlifting straps. If it's good enough to tow a car it call pull 200+ kgs.
*Hockey Stick tape for sports tape


So you generally, you can see some of the extreme measures we take to keep going in our sport. Is there anything you guys do like this?

Here are some other things that we do to feel better that are cheap or creative:
Homemade hydrocollator: You can use an electric roasting oven like Nesco, and put water and towels inside to make hot packs.
Ice cups: Fill water into a paper cup and when it's frozen, unwrap the cup and massage the affected area.
Cold Plunge: Buy a ton of ice and put it in your bath tub with water. If you don't have a bath tub, you can get a baby pool or a trough and add in ice water.

Are you guys creative and cheap in this way? What have you found that you can use to recover and get ready for the next workout?

Sarah

3 comments:

Mel said...

Hah! I was loving this post. My parents use DMSO also to help skin ointments penetrate deeper. And we've been known to use a Dremel tool on calluses. My sister was a high-level gymnast in her youth, and we always had Dixie cups full of water in the freezer. Oh, and bags of frozen peas.

Ah, Memories. :)

What about an S&M shop for black leather wrist-straps (though you might have to remove any spikes...)

Angie Sorensen said...

I have taken gallon milk jugs, cut them in half, filled them with water, and frozen them. Now half my freezer is taken up with giant ice cubes for my ice baths.

Unknown said...

You forgot McTarnahan's aka Blue Heat!