Since my hospitalization last year, I've been trying things to build back stomach and other muscles.
The first exercise was 20 Coins. I have a dish of miscellaneous foreign coins that I pour on the floor, and have to pick up one at a time, alternating hands.
The most recent one I'm doing now is picking golf balls out of a bowl at the base of the stairs, the "cup" being exactly 4 inches deep. So I have to bend down further than I'm used to. I found that on a recent trip to Vail that I didn't have the range of motion to get the ball out of the cup after putting. So after 3 days now I'm up to 6 golf balls! My goal is 18 balls.
I feel for you, man. Recovery from bypass surgery was the hardest thing I've ever done. I'm actually starting my spring training this weekend with some treadmill time, I have to get my legs back under me before Opening Day. Standing on concrete for six to eight hours straight takes some conditioning at my age.
FWIW, I found the exercises in this book to be very helpful in building core strength.
My only personal physical therapy experience (so far I guess) was after I had to have pins put into my badly broken ring finger. I was constantly impressed with the therapists ability to give me seemingly small tasks that managed to be incredibly difficult and helpful for recovery. Picking coins up off of a table was one of the toughest for me.
I married a Physical Therapist, so I guess I do have tons of experience. We got engaged during the months I was doing very painful physical therapy after my rotator cuff surgery. If our relationship survived that, it can survive anything.
PT for hip replacement was pretty standard; it was watching the folks with shoulder repair struggling with their PT that made me glad to have my regimen and not theirs
The worst was the stretching to break up the scar tissue. It felt like the therapist (my wife) was re-tearing everything in the shoulder. Scar tissue, releasing, sounded like popcorn
My labrum+rotator cuff was not fun
The surgeon who did mine was also the surgeon who did many of the Minnesota Twins pitcher's surgeries at that time (late 90's). Originally was going to be an outpatient recovery, but it went from a 90 minute anticipated surgery to a 3.5 hour event, with an overnight stay in the hospital due to a bad reaction to the anesthesia. I had played men's fastpitch softball for 2 years after the tear in my rotator cuff. The doc said it was probably the worst looking shoulder he ever worked on. I re-tore it 10 years ago throwing batting practice while coaching my son, but did not gotten it fixed. I switched to a side-armed coach after that.
My rotator cuff was fine, but I had almost no cartilage left. "Decompression" surgery (cutting off the ends of bones to make joint space).
Surgeon after the arthrogram: "uh, how old are you?"
Never a good comment.
Oh, yea. Shoulder PT suh-hucked.