After my 3rd lot of knee surgery I decided to stop running – it was a head over heart decision. I started swimming as a replacement sport – it had to be front crawl as breast stroke is murder on your knees and although I could swim and was fit from running I couldn’t swim 2 lengths without a break when I first started. In 3 years of swimming I ramped up to swimming 9 hours a week – 3 lots of 2-3hr swims (200-300 lengths) and then, last April 1st 2017 I realised I had a shoulder problem that was not going to go away – I’m now 12 months down the line from that and still have no idea if my shoulder will ever be right again. I had a lot of physio that only worsened the pain my shoulder. When I finally had an MRI scan – 6 months after the injury started to rear it’s head and after 3 months of physio – 2 problems were identified – a partial tear in the Supraspinatus muscle and a possible tear in the labrum. I had a steroid injection in the shoulder for the supraspinatus which actually didn’t make much difference – but 6 weeks afterwards I started to think things had improved slightly – I had the injection 2 days after I started 5:2. So – it’s hard to say if the improvement was due to the steroid injection – I was told that the improvements may well appear quite quickly – within days/first week – although I was also told at a later meeting that the benefits can take weeks to manifest themselves. I can understand or speculate that losing weight might help reduce pain or inflammation in knees but I wondered if the “cell repair” triggered by fasting that is talked about in Moseley’s 5:2 book may also be a factor in the slight improvement in my shoulder problem (the supraspinatus muscle is one of the 4 rotator cuff muscles) – I wondered if anyone else had had a shoulder problem that they had thought might have improved during the time they had been doing 5:2. It could be co-incidence – many injuries heal with time but my shoulder problem had seen no improvement for something like 8-9 months (in fact a worsening due to inappropriate physio prescribed to me because the physio’s did not have the benefits of having the results of an MRI scan to consider – after they saw the scan results they recommended stopping all physio exercises I had been doing at home).