more on dead butt syndrome & what it means to the Donkey

Parenthetical side note: the ass/Donkey connection tickles my fancy.

I'm posting these entries under the assumption that my audience is entirely comprised of people who know me personally, most of whom I see on a regular basis, so I'm wasting little time with explanations about some of the wackass things I do for fun, an example of which is CrossFit.  If you have found my blog by tragic accident and don't know what CrossFit is, let's start by saying it's better explained pretty much anywhere but here.  Next I'll take the lazy way out and send you to this website.  Yes, it's every bit as nuts as whatever you found on the website, and I love that whole thing, but I also really dig the community that can be found in the boxes across the world.

With that out of the way, I can now resume discussion of my dead butt syndrome, which I still cannot take seriously, but I need to, because it's a huge pain in the knee.  How does my ass have anything to do with my knee?   As best as I can understand it:

The muscles in your body are designed to work in synergy.  People with dead butt syndrome have an especially weak glute muscle, usually glute medius.  For someone who sits around eating bonbons all day, this isn't really a problem.  For someone who really really REALLY wants to deadlift 300+, however, it's a huge problem, for two reasons.

1.  Without this muscle firing properly, an athlete cannot hope to achieve greatness at lifts like deadlift and squat, not only because you actually need this muscle (among others) to execute the lift to full potential, but also because if you cannot fire this muscle, your body (clever thing that it is) will recruit other muscles to do the work, which leads us to item 2.

2.  I've been unable to work out regularly this past year--if I was lucky, I got in 1 WOD a week, and there were weeks at a time when I was out of the game entirely.  My knees have both been mysteriously swelling up, though not typically both at the same time.  This is an issue that has been rearing up from time to time for years before I ever found CrossFit--in fact, it was also a huge problem when I was doing little more than power walking.   This past year has been one experiment after another trying to find a solution.  Finally, I saw an ortho, who has identified the issue as the incredibly unglamorous sounding "dead butt syndrome".

Basically what's going on is that my glute medius is a lazy bastard, and all the other muscles are recruited to work harder when I do anything active.  This makes either hamstring or quad/IT band tighter than it should be and no amount of rolling/stretching can fix the resulting problem, which is a fucked up knee.  For a while I was focusing on the slow lifts, thinking that the problem was more about jumping, running, and similar activities, rather than muscles out of balance.  I made the problem so much worse with this focus, because I wasn't doing anything to fix the weak muscle, and I kept asking more and more of the other muscles.   Then, in October, we had a Oly Lifting seminar.  Since that weekend I've been virtually unable to do any CrossFit at all.  I could still row, and I did that, but always with pain afterwards to varying degrees.

The result is that over the last year, I've lost strength, the precious little endurance I had, and tonight's WOD showed me exactly how bad it's gotten.  Not only was I unable to come anywhere close to Rx, but I also had one of the slowest times on the board, despite only using 95# for Push Jerks--a weight I'd have considered easy peasy lemon squeezy a year ago.

At this point, it's not even about being competitive, although I know that I am pushed by other athletes, and enjoy the times when I can keep up or even push others with my numbers.  I am officially what I'd call "deconditioned".

Among other things, this means I have a lot of work to do and the first step is addressing this dead butt business, which cascades into a host of other things, namely, keeping my knees healthy enough to assure a continued ability to hit the WODs.  I doubt I'll ever be a firebreather, but there was a time when I was getting really strong, and I miss that.

If you see me in the gym doing Jane Fonda-style leg lifts and glute bridges, that's why.