Yesterday for the first time, I was swinging completely pain-free with the Momentus Heavy Iron.

I still have to warm up by stretching the shoulder and doing some resistance band work before the pain goes away, and I am careful of over-doing it, but I am hoping to be hitting balls sometime this week.

So I’ve progressed pretty well in the last week – full range of motion regained and only a little tenderness if I pick up a club to swing cold, but once I’ve warmed the shoulder up, it’s good to go.

I’m actually feeling a little soreness in the hip area because, although I have still be able to do the pivot drills the past year, it’s been nearly 12 months since I’ve actually hit balls – the hips are feeling it swinging the heavy iron, but it’s that good “post-workout” soreness and not pain from damage.

This is what I’ve been using – the SwingRite is too light for strengthening and I’m not trying to build speed, just get some strength back into the muscles and joint, and this bad boy is excellent:

Perhaps another day or two to keep strengthening and loosening things up, and then I’ll try a half-hour easy swinging on the simulator at Tracer Golf.

I can’t even say that I’ve been waiting for this day.  The past year, until early March when I began the rehab on the Welshman’s advice, my shoulder has been so painful that I really began to think that my swinging days were over without surgery of some sort.

To think that, about two months after I began to make the first extremely painful attempts to get the shoulder moving again (for a few days, I didn’t do anything more than just try to move and lift my arm in various positions, which was bad enough on the pain scale), I’m nearly ready to swing again…

It’s a gift beyond gifts – I thought I might have actually come to the end of my swing research and model-building, only to watch others benefit from it and to be unable to ever swing again myself.

So, a good week already and it’s only Monday!

More to come.