The main thing I need to work on is reducing the palm up/palm down repetitions. Literally might be 1000 reps on a normal work day.
I don't think I know a single person who works in a factory, or assembly line, construction, or other repetitive motion job that doesn't have some sort of chronic pain.
I spent five years "marking timber". This involved using paint guns with a squeeze mechanism on a very tightly sprung paint gun, with quart sized cans screwed onto the bottom. Most normal days we would go through 36 quarts per person, but on a nice weather day when everyone slept well, and depending on timber densities and prescriptions, we did go as high as 48 quarts in a day. You would think we would all have had Popeye forearms and be able to crush a walnut with our fingers. Instead we all had carpal tunnel and nerve damage.
If I do some quick math figuring:
43,560 sqft / acre
Residual density was about 20' x 20', so that's 400 sqft per tree. Divide that into 43,560 and you get 108 trees per acre.
I would typically mark about 10 acres on average per day, so that's 1080 trees marked per day.
It took 9 squeezes of the paint gun per tree to get an adequate mark. So that's 9,720 squeezes of that paint gun per day, and 38,880 per week. I'll figure 4 days per week, because we did have other duties to perform as well, but we did work 6 days a week sometimes. That's 2,021,276 per year, and 10,108,800 in the five years I did the job, and countless miles walked.
I remember my finger tips often felt cold on warm days and I would drop something out of the blue. It would just slip from between my fingers and I'd have no idea until it hit me in the foot. After doing the math, I see why.
I'm very fortunate that this was between the ages of 23 and 28, and is many years past. Those were good years, and a ton of fun, but when I think about what I was doing to my hands, not to mention the beating my ankles, knees, hips, and back took from constantly hiking, I shutter a bit. I only got into shooting the last year or two I did that job, and then I was promoted. I wonder how my poor shooting back then was added to with the impacts of that job.
One thing is for sure, I'm a much better shooter now, though a lot of that is experience of course. I doubt very much that I could have tolerated reloading.
All in all I'm in good health for a early middle aged guy, and I hope it stays that way. I do wonder though will my repetitive habits do harm in the long run. I mean I have already worn out more boots hiking at age 39 than some people will in a lifetime. I religiously lift fairly heavy dumbbells every other night as well and my hands and arms are sore afterwards. I sometimes wonder if it is a detriment to shooting. Maybe a more moderate weight would be better.
Occasionally I end up with a locked up back after a range session. I can't tolerate a modified isosceles stance for very long as being slightly leaned forward ruins my back fast. So I instinctively fall into a Weaver stance. However, that position hurts after very long also. So I have to switch things up. I expect this would be a major detriment if I ever chose to compete.
