Mark has never failed to inspire. Early March and

after three years of training, he celebrated his

60th birthday with 100 single-arm beast (48kg)

swings in 5 minutes. The next day, he rucked 6

miles with 60lbs.

Almost exactly one year ago, I wrote about my

shoulder pain for the first time. It got worse

last November when I did my first 10x32kg TGUs.

That forced me to take December off. This month,

I have been able to work exclusively with the 32kg.

So the 24kg to 32kg jump took about 14 months.

Here are the things that I learnt.

One root cause for the pains could be my

internally rotated shoulders and forward-hanging

head. Both Mark and Ric told me about my posture

problems. I have been trying to fix them by

conciously pushing back my neck during the day and

sleeping on the hardwood floor at night. The

awareness by itself has been very helpful.

For the last few weeks, I have been trying hanging

on a pullup bar. It invariably made the pain go

away. For this idea, I had to thank Professor 

Maxwell who told the story of a well-known doctor

giving up surgery and telling people with shoulder

pains to "just hang."

Surya Namaskar helps. These days, I usually wake

up with shoulder pains and 50 SNs fix it for the

morning. Of course, I still feel it later in the

day but yoga puts me on the right track.

The shoulder is an intricate structure and as my

posture improves the pain could be just part of

the training making me strong. As long as I am

pushing my limits pain is expected.