Hi everyone! Welcome to my Blog and Training Journal.

First let me introduce myself.
My name is Michael Elias and I am a FAME Pro Bodybuilder.

After earning my FAME Pro Card in 2005 I had set my sights on competing in the 2006 FAME World Championships in Toronto. Unfortunately, in December 2006, while finishing up the last week of my off season heavy training phase, I suffered a complete tear of my left Pec Major tendon. The pec completely tore away from the bone and retracted into my chest tearing both the tendon and muscle to shreads. It was quite a devastating injury and I was worried that my bodybuilding career would be over.

I underwent surgery the next week to repair and re-attach the tendon and then began the long process of recovery.
I was determined to come back from this injury, despite the difficulty. In order to help me deal with the situation, and to maintain my motivation, I kept a detailed log of my progress back with pictures.

I'd like to share a summary of this with you so you can see process I went through, and to possibly help anyone else who has, or may experience this type of injury.

First, here's a recap of the injury pics and a little background:

Here are a few pics taken in the gym and on stage before the tear:

The picture below was taken about a month before the tear. I was in the last weeks of my 2005 mass building phase when the tear occurred.

The next picture was taken over the 3 days following the tear.
The bruising actually became much worse. By the time of my surgery on the 19th, my entire bicep, armpit, and chest was

black, blue, purple, and green from the bruising and bleeding.

The final picture was taken the night of my surgery, after returning home.

Here is a picture showing exactly where on the muscle that my tear occurred.

This should give you an idea of the incision size ( 3-4 inches ) and the surgical process that I went through.

Here is an excellent diagram showing exactly what happened in my case:

Here are a couple pics taken about 10 days Post Op when the bandages came off. I was already down about 15 lbs at this point.

Below is a pic taken at about 6 weeks post op.

I was down about 20 lbs at this point, and you can really see the overall atrophy, and especially the atrophy on the left side.

At 6 weeks post op I started physical theraphy, and for the next 4 weeks I went twice per week to begin working on range of motion and stretching of the repaired tendon.

I finished physical therapy in March, and for the next 12 weeks I was allowed to do only cardio and some very, very light machine and dumbbell work.

In June, I was finally released to begin full training again.
Here is how things looked after 6 months of no significant training or resistance work with the left side of my upper body. ( Yikes! )

I was down about 35 pounds here.

The pictures below document my progress since being able to return to the gym.

These pictures were taken after being back in the weight room for two weeks:

This pic was taken after being back on the weights for 4 weeks:

These shots were taken after 7 weeks back in the gym:

The pics immediately below were taken in August 2006, about 8 months post op.

The pic below that shows my progression up to that point,

The pictures below were taken about 10 months post op.
My weight was back up to 192 at that time and I could finally start to push a little bit heavier weight.
MY training weights were still significantly down from my pre-injury training, and I rarely went over
bodyweight with any exercise at this time.

After completing a mass building phase over the winter in 2006 I began cutting again
in February 2007 in preparation to return to the FAME stage.

The pictures below were taken in March 2007 weighing about 195, down 10 lbs from my heaviest weight during
my mass building phase.

Below are pictures from May 2007, after cutting for about 12 weeks.

Weight was about 178 here.

During this phase of my recovery, I was still unable to really train with any heavy weight, so my training
consisted mostly of supersets, drop sets, and other techniques to increase the training intensity without
relying on heavy training.

Below is a pic from October 2007, 2 weeks out from my return to the stage last year at the
FAME North American Championships, and one from the stage.

Although I was still down quite a bit in size from before the injury. I was very proud to be able
to push through the difficulty of the injury and return to the stage. As I told Jeff and Mindy at the show,
I won by just stepping back on stage.

I am taking this year off from competition to work on adding back the size I lost, but will be returning to the
stage next year bigger and better than ever!

I will now continue this story with a log of my current training toward my return next year!
I'll be posting some new pictures later this week and will track my progress back to the stage here in this
blog. Please feel free to ask any questions or add any comments. I look forward to sharing my continuing
Bodybuilding story with you all!

Michael

www.MichaelElias.com