Unfortunately, this is nothing new to me. I have dealt with countless fractures, tears, compressions, and sprains over the years. Some have been my own fault, others, out of my control.

Injuries are a part of sport, lifting, and training, but it doesn’t make the reality of having an injury any easier to comprehend or deal with. While picking up a few minor injuries can’t be avoided, more serious problems can be kept at bay. Here are the factors that have helped me learn from injuries and prevent recurrences over the years – to get back up again and stay standing for as long as possible.

After twelve months of hard work, my chances at England’s Strongest Man were dashed due to injury.

1. Understand Your Injury and Then Review What Went Wrong

First, understand what the injury is and how it was caused. Repetitive stress, poor movement patterns, imbalances, lifting something too heavy, or just a freak accident. Once you know the likely cause of what went wrong, then you can review why it happened. You are no longer spending hours in the weight room, so use your time off productively – think and assess.

Without a thorough review of the injury, the cause, and the effectiveness of the recovery plan, you will stand a greater chance of getting injured again. Reconsider the requirements of your sport or discipline. Are you preparing correctly in the weight room?

2. Examine Your Technique

Technique is king. You can succeed and fail on your lifting technique alone. This is obvious if you compete in powerlifting or strongman as it directly relates to sport-specific ability and kilograms lifted. However, if you play in another sport where you are transferring your time under a bar to performance on a pitch, in a pool, or on a running track, your lifting technique can still dictate success and successful injury prevention.

“If you are lifting with bad technique, then you are overloading some muscle groups, weakening others, and creating imbalances.”

As you lift, you ask your body to perform countless actions and contractions to build, support, and stabilize your muscles. If you are lifting with bad technique, then you are overloading some muscle groups, weakening others, and creating imbalances. All of these weaknesses are exposed when competing and so – apparently out of nowhere – something goes wrong.

Could your technique be creating an injury waiting to happen? If you’re not sure, find a coach who knows what he or she is talking about and focus on your fundamental training movements.

Lifting places huge demands on the body, so be sure you’re doing it right.

3. Programming Failing to Adequately Prepare You

Be careful you don’t neglect aspects of your training. Have you done enough specific and focused training for the task at hand or just hoped the body would stand up to the rigors of your challenge and sport?

“If you keep getting injured in competitions, then chances are you’re not preparing adequately.”

For example, my legs and back are strong enough for me to pick up a 420kg yoke and walk with it, but the supporting muscles need to be up to the task too. Are the quadratus lumborum and erector spinae trained and strong enough to cope with the challenge of the torsion the yoke places on the back? If they aren’t, you’re setting yourself up for an injury.

Don’t assume the body can handle what you’re throwing at it. Consider your training, and if this preparation is enough to adequately safeguard your body for the rigors of your sport. If you keep getting injured in competitions, then chances are you’re not preparing adequately.

4. Mobility and Flexibility

Both the general population and athletes are more aware of mobility and flexibility than ever. Pay attention to your joints, their range of movement, and your muscles’ ability to perform the movements they are being asked to do.

“Consider the areas that feel tight, jammed up, and not operating through a full range, and get them sorted.”

Mobility and flexibility work can easily be thrown into warm ups and recovery sessions. Without them, the joints are often not capable of loading the amount of stress being asked of them and something then has to give.

Don’t allow poor hip mobility to lead to a glute or hip flexor tear. Don’t allow poor hamstring flexibility to contribute to a hamstring pull on the day. Consider the areas that feel tight, jammed up, and not operating through a full range, and get them sorted.

Prevention is easier than cure. This is why movement patterns and mobility are top priority in my five step approach to programming:

1. Fix the movement
2. Clean up the rep
3. Apply effort and intensity
4. Get results
5. Repeat

Walking around with joint soreness all day, every day is not the norm or acceptable. Nor is it a badge of honor. So if that’s you, sort it out now before you’re walking around all day, every day with crutches in your hands instead.

What good is lifting a lot of weight if you can barely walk for the rest of the day?

5. Physical Therapy Screenings

Don’t always try to self-diagnose. A trained eye is better than your observational powers, so find a good physical therapist or sports therapist and get your posture, movement, and proprioception checked by someone who knows exactly what they are doing.

They can find imbalances, problems, and potential weaknesses and give you a protocol to follow to ensure these ticking time bombs are ironed out. Poor posture and stability can lead to a whole range of pulls, tears, and pain. If you’re sat down all day, or you already feel like you’re hunched over, get yourself looked at.

Prevention Is Key

Remember – prevention is easier than the cure. Take the time to consider if your preparation is setting you up for success or injury. Improve on the quality of your training time and stay on the field of battle longer than your competitors.

You’ll Also Enjoy:

• 4 Needless Mistakes You’re Making in Strongman Training
• 3 Reasons You Don’t Squat More (And What to Do About It)
• Injury Prevention: The Most Important Goal in Every Training Session
• New on Breaking Muscle Today

Photo 1 courtesy of John Clark.

Photo 2 by By Calgary Reviews from Calgary, Canada (Sun and Salsa Festival Strongman Tire Flip), via Wikimedia Commons.

Photo 3 by By Celia Wagner, via Wikimedia Commons.

The post A 5-Step Path to Injury-Free Strength Training appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

There’s no way around it—injuries suck. As a coach, gym owner, and a massage therapist, I see them constantly and I observe the way they affect people’s lives. I also know from personal experience how devastating injury and pain can be. Why, then, is it such a taboo subject? What can we do (as trainers and clients) to mitigate the effects of injury? Let’s talk a bit about personal experience before we discuss solutions.

My Road of Injury

When I was eighteen, after several years of martial arts, dance, and CrossFit training, I wound up with very severe and very mysterious pain in my right hip and my left shoulder. I didn’t have health insurance at the time so there wasn’t a whole lot I could do, but the pain was severe enough that it affected my ability to move, work, and exercise the way I was accustomed to. Being young, I assumed (and was repeatedly told) that I would recover naturally with time. But I didn’t.

At the age of twenty-one, after several years of frustration, I was approved for a contrast MRI of my hip. My joint was severely impinged and my cartilage had been ground down to nearly nothing. We also discovered that I had developed mild scoliosis and an inguinal hernia.

I had reconstructive surgery on my hip shortly thereafter and got my inguinal hernia repaired five weeks after my hip surgery. (Note: my shoulder pain was likely due to a micro-tear or strain in a rotator cuff muscle. I did not get surgery on my shoulder, but I rehabbed the hell out of it. It took about a year for it to feel “normal” again).

The post-surgery road was enlightening, and I learned several important lessons. Injury begets more injury. Our bodies are amazing at compensating and avoiding pain. For me, having such major injuries at such a young age has meant dealing with regular and chronic injury ever since, and likely means I will be dealing with this pattern on some level for a very long time. I have had recurring issues with my lower back and neck, with my knees and my shoulders, but I now know how to respond, both physically and mentally.

You Have to Do the Work

In order to recover from injury or even nagging pain, you need to put in work. Rehabilitation is not about temporarily doing whatever you need to fix your issues and then being done with the issues forever after that.

You will likely need to completely re-think the way that you move and approach exercise, and you will likely need to continue your rehab (sometimes to a lesser extent) preventatively for a long time.

Once you are injured, you probably can’t go on “autopilot” in the gym anymore—you need to pay attention, stay aware, and stay on top of your rehab and pre-hab efforts. The sooner we accept this, the happier you will be.

If you can do any exercise, you are lucky and you need to take advantage of that ability. This one is a tough one. Injury has a tendency to bring out the “inner extremist” in all of us. I can’t judge, because I’ve been there; however, as a coach for the last eight years, I am appalled at how many regular clients cancel their memberships and stop exercising because they develop an injury.

The great thing about fitness (namely, functional training and strength training) is that there are literally hundreds (maybe thousands?) of exercises in existence. There was a period in time in which I had a “menu” of about eight exercises that I knew wouldn’t cause me pain—and after much griping, I learned to live with that temporary circumstance and I utilized those exercises.

Pain sucks, and rehab is boring. You know what sucks even more? Having to completely rebuild your baseline fitness and rehab an injury at the same time. Can’t do upper body work? Learn about different variations of squats and lunges. Have an injured knee? Work on your arms and core. If you can move, do it. You will thank yourself later.

The ego needs to go. This is perhaps the toughest of them all. Professional and competitive athletes excepted, your lifts and benchmark workout times do not define you. Your performance will vary day by day, year by year, and situation by situation.

When you are injured currently or previously or are prone to injury, your health becomes your number one priority. Whether you are lifting alone or taking a class with 20 people, if you feel you are doing damage to yourself, fix it.

Talk to your coach. Listen to your body and adjust. Do what you need to do to make sure that you address the issue quickly. If you don’t you are essentially gambling on your quality of life for the next month/year/decade for the sake of a few moments of competitive glory and ego. Be smart.

Get help from a qualified professional. Your trainer is not a doctor (and on that note, if you encounter a trainer that attempts to act like a doctor: please run away). Your friend with chronic neck issues can’t diagnose you.

That blog post you read on back pain is not customized to you. Seek help from a medical professional that knows what they are talking about.

Being in pain, being physically limited, and feeling like there’s no endpoint take a huge toll on our mental health. I get it. My personal injury history is the reason I got into this business; however, perspective trumps all.

When it comes to prevention and ego, what is ultimately more important to you: beating the guy next to you on the bench press in the next few minutes, or being able to put your shirt on by yourself for the next two weeks? Most of us work out so that we can live healthier lives. Make sure that your goal is reflected in your methods.

Take Advantage of Your Abilities

When it comes to injury rehabilitation: as harsh as it sounds, it’s not that big of a deal. My oldest sister has been confined to a wheelchair for over half of her life. My mother suffered a painful terminal illness for months.

Chances are, even when you’re injured, there are millions of people who would give anything to be able to do a quarter of what you can do. Take advantage of your abilities. Work on changing your movement patterns, seek treatment, be proactive about your recovery, scale workouts however you need to for the time being, and then just live your life.

These days, even when I wind up with pain that puts me in a neck brace for a couple of weeks, I work around it, I take proactive steps to alleviate the issue, and then I do my best to push it out of my mind. This mental control is a difficult skill to develop, especially when your pain affects other areas of your life, but it’s important.

Keep yourself in check. Our lives are full of struggles, and pain may be one of them, don’t let it rule your emotions if you have the luxury of a temporary situation. Be safe, be proactive, and stay active.

The post Recovering from Injury appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

UCL Injury

The damaged ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) can be a setback for any individual. With varying degrees of injury to the ligament, an individual may be out for a few days to over a year if there is a complete rupture to the UCL. The most minor of these sprains means a person could return relatively quickly to activity, usually within a few days. I remember when I sprained my UCL. I was out for about a week, and then was taping my elbow with the help of my co-workers so I could return to Jiu-Jitsu.

Bursitis

If you have ever hit your elbow hard enough, especially on the edge, then you may have noticed major swelling, also known as bursitis. This can be rather painful and may need a physician. Usually you can take care of this yourself by icing and compressing the area. However, in more extreme cases, the physician may need to drain it. If that is done, and you return to activity, you may consider using an elbow pad for the first week or so.

Tennis Elbow

Another irritating elbow issue is best known as “tennis elbow.” In the medical arena it is known as lateral epicondylitis. This can happen to anyone from the grappler to the powerlifter and results from overuse of the extensor muscles in the forearm. The onset of pain is gradual and as it worsens the person is unable to perform his/her activity at the highest level. If caught early enough, it is best treated with rest, ice, compression, and elevation (RICE). For those who may wait a bit longer, the use of other therapeutic aides may be necessary. These aides can range from anti-inflammatory/pain medications to a brace. This is all dependent upon what instructions you are given from a medical professional.

Muscle Strains

Muscle strains can occur anywhere, lower leg to back to shoulder to anywhere there are muscles in the body. Around the elbow, the biceps, triceps, forearm flexors, and extensors are the most commonly injured. The worst of these can be a torn biceps. When this happens the muscle “balls” up in the upper arm. From here there are two options: let it heal as it is or have surgery to have it reattached. In most cases, surgery is the best option. This choice all depends on age, activity level, the individual involved, and the physician. A less severe biceps injury means you have strained the muscle without a complete tear. These can be slow healing because of the amount the arm is used and the fact this muscle serves two purposes: elbow flexion and assisting with shoulder flexion. The best and worst case scenario is a few days to a few months for recovery. It all depends on healing and how well it is taken care of.

Rehabilitating the Elbow

Taking care of and rehabilitating the elbow is a rather different process. Most of the time, it’s all about strengthening the injured muscle. Well, being a joint, it needs strengthening both above and below the joint. For the sprained elbow, once inflammation is down and range of motion has been restored, strengthening can proceed. The best thing to do is strengthen the forearm by doing gripping exercises, such as scrunching up a towel, squeezing putty, or performing flexion and extension exercises using a dumbbell. For the upper arm, any form of biceps curls or triceps extensions will help to strengthen this area. Remember, if there is pain, back off and consult a health professional as needed. None of these exercises should cause pain; well, outside of the normal muscle soreness.

The elbow, although a fairly stable looking joint, can be susceptible to many injuries. They can range from relatively minor to something major that requires surgery. As an athlete, it is good for you to have a basic idea of injuries and how to handle them.

Recovering From Elbow Injury

1. Always begin with RICE.
2. Move to range of motion exercises, regaining flexion and extension as needed.
3. Incorporate exercises that will help build strength and stability to the joint.

If ever in doubt about the injury, check with your physician. Activity should last a lifetime. Better to take care of something early than wait until it becomes a problem. Injuries are a part of life; how the injury is handled, determines how well a successful recovery will occur.

You might also like:

• Got A Cranky Elbow? How To Train Smart And Prevent Pain
• How To Heal Tennis Elbow And Golfer’s Elbow
• How To Treat Kettlebell Lifter’s Elbow
• Tennis Elbow: What Is It, Do You Have It, And How Do You Treat It?

The post Common Elbow Injuries and What to Do About Them appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

To truly feel fulfilled in your training, you must build your mindset on gratitude. Gratitude for what you already have—any progress you have made and a body that, regardless of training, can already move in so many beautiful ways. Gratitude for your opportunity to train and your access to gyms, trainers, and fresh food. Gratitude for your culture and community which, despite many detrimental influences, provides overwhelming value and supports your personal health and fitness journey.

As a coach, I aim to instill gratitude in every athlete that I work with. As an athlete myself, I actively cultivate and maintain gratitude for my own body, training, and opportunities. As a writer, I have shared the benefits of expressing gratitude and measuring progress by looking back, rather than looking forward.

Despite holding these ideals as priority, I have seen recently how easily we can drift from them. My past several articles have been about injury. I have discussed both ways to reframe your thinking about an injury, and way to ways to see the positive opportunities and lessons that follow an injury, rather than allowing it to drag you into an emotional slump.

The last two weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to return to a bit of light training after two months off. I came to accept my situation early, and focused my commitment on other work. Experience with past injuries reminded me that I would most certainly come to look back on this one as a gift. While my last two months have not been spent as I would have preferred, I largely resisted the pull into a depressive state.

Despite remaining relatively positive, I had allowed my gratitude for my body to wane. Soon after developing a hernia, my own words on gratitude came back to me when one of my articles was published. I was struck by my own dismissal of a lesson whose value I had just professed. A beautiful aspect of teaching and writing is that often, our own words are those we need to hear most.

Returning With Gratitude

As I return now to a very minimal and mellow version of what my training once was, I feel overwhelmed with gratitude. I’ve never been so thankful for push ups, pull ups, or jogging.

An injury always presents a lesson. I’ve known and felt how an injury can bring awareness to a physical limitation, spotlighting issues we didn’t know about, and showing us areas to work on. This heightened awareness will then permeate each movement that we do, deepening our relationship to our physical bodies.

I’ve learned that an injury can likewise enhance our sense of gratitude. Similar to physical awareness, my time away has helped me to develop real-time gratitude while training. In the past, my fitness gratitude practice has been largely reflective and retrospective. Pondering, discussing, or writing about how thankful I feel for my body, my training, my gym community, and the associated fun and progress that follow. However, my first workout back, during a short run interval as part of longer set, I felt a wash of gratitude fill me from top to bottom. I was sweaty for the first time in months, breathing hard and heart pounding, entering “the dark place” after such a long hiatus. I could not have felt more grateful. The privilege to do a few simple bodyweight exercises and run around the block nearly moved me to tears.

Time away as helped me to feel thankful for every rep and every training session. An injury can not only bring a new physical awareness, but a deeper gratitude to every moment of your training.

In the past, I both practiced and preached reframing an injury to view it as a gift; an opportunity to learn more about your body and move forward with new lessons in mind. I now see the road toward recovery for the opportunity it truly is: a journey away from a familiar place, only to return and see it again with fresh eyes.

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

The post Your First Workout Post-Injury: Time to Learn Something New appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Injury Factor #1: Problems With Equipment

A shoddy platform with cracks and uneven surfaces can lead to ankle joint injuries. Athletes and coaches should monitor their platform on a daily basis looking for any irregularities that could cause problems to their lifters’ footing.

Bars also have to be examined frequently. Strains of the radio-carpal joints can arise as a consequence of poor rotation of the bar, not oiling the bushings, or the bar being bent. Before every lift of the bar, you should make sure it bar rotates well, and only then should you begin the lift.

It is also necessary to look at your clothing – specifically, your shoes. Shoes should not have soles with projecting nails or a separate heel. These can catch on the platform. Furthermore, leather-soled shoes should be rubbed in resin to ensure a good grip on the platform. The best preventative here is to have all one-piece rubber soles with no abrupt heel.

Other problems can occur with the bar. If the sleeves are well oiled and the collars are not locked on securely, then plates can slide off during the course of a lift and thus cause unbalanced loading on the body. The only place where this is desirable is if you are foolish enough to bench press maximum weights when all alone. In that case slippery sleeves will help you unload the bar in a pinch.

Injury Factor #2: Body and Exercise Problems

Weightlifters often experience low-back pain. In most cases this arises because of compression loading on the spinal column. Heavy loads squeeze the intervertebral discs, leading to a deformation of the vertebrae and sometimes strained ligaments. In our sport, back loading cannot be avoided, though. Lifters continually attempt big lifts in training, done for many reps and many sets, especially squats. One way to avoid much of this is to split up the squat workout. It is not necessary to do multiple sets all in one workout. The squats can be spread out during the day or the week in order to greatly decrease your back loading.

The second most common area for injury damage in weightlifters occurs in the shoulder girdle. The shoulders are loaded in almost all exercises, even squats. The best way to prevent injuries is to do overhead pressing, assuming you are flexible enough in that position that no bone impingement occurs. In combination with that, you should also always make sure the shoulders are adequately warmed up before progressing to heavier weights. Trying to hurry a warm-up involving the shoulders is sheer folly. You will pay for your foolishness.

Lifters can end up with knee problems as well. The most common injury is patellar tendinitis, which usually comes from the aforementioned inadequate warm-up. The solution here is obvious. A more serious condition occurs when you do not know how to bounce out of your squat clean properly. There are right and wrong ways to do this, as I have outlined in a previous article. The wrong way will result in stretched ligaments.

A less common injury can occur in the neck vertebrae. The usual culprit here is the good morning exercise. The bar has a tendency to roll down from the shoulders onto the neck when the athlete is at the bottom of the exercise. This can result in a sort of dull guillotine effect on the neck. Naturally this is problematic with larger weights, but it can still occur even with lighter warm-up poundages if you start the back contraction too abruptly. In this lift, it is acceptable in gym culture to use a towel for padding. I myself prefer the safety squat bar. It has both padding in the neck area and yolk handles that allow for complete control of the barbell at all phases of the exercise.

Injury Factor #3: Warming Up

We have all read about the importance of a good warm-up prior to a workout or competition, and I have mentioned it multiple times here already. You know this is a good idea, but often you are in a hurry to get you started (and finished), so you may shortchange yourself on the warm-up. You may hope that after you do a couple sets, you will be warmed up anyway. But the reason you warm-up is to stretch your muscles, tendons, and ligaments, and to get the blood flowing and to practice the coming movement patterns. Truncating the warm-up will have adverse effects when the heavier sets occur. This is the best way to give yourself a pulled muscle or strained ligaments.

Injury Factor #4: The Work Sets

The technical and functional unpreparedness of the lifter is the cause of the most injuries and damage. This can include contusions, muscle strain, dislocations, and fractures of the bones. One of the more spectacular occurrences in gym comes when a lifter blacks out with a heavy clean or press. This occurs with the bar blocks blood flow in the carotid artery. This is prevented by taking big gulps of air prior to lift ensure that enough oxygen will be available. This is also why we do not want straight plates sitting on the platform

Injuries are certainly possible when missing a lift. Just as wrestlers are taught how to safely fall when thrown to the mat, weightlifters should learn how to safely miss. This should be one of the first things a coach teaches a lifter, even before teaching him or her how to actually lift. You certainly want to be out of the way of a falling bar. With minimal instruction, you can learn how to avoid this mishap. In fact, the energy displayed by the bar while dropping can be used to your favor by helping to push you out of the way.

Overtraining is also problematic. By overtraining I do not mean having an exceptionally heavy workout. Overtraining is the result of chronically training beyond your recovery capabilities. This is why we have periodization. We do purposely overtrain for a specific period of time, but then we unload our training sessions in order to affect an eventual adaptation to the higher loads. If this unloading is delayed too long, then injury and organism breakdown are the inevitable results.

After years of training, many lifters also develop pains in the small of the back as a result of calcium deposits. Fortunately, it is possible to avoid major damage from this and even to reduce the problem. After every squat session you should perform forward bends, placing your hands of the floor while keeping the legs stiff at the knees. This exercise can be performed with weights. Another recommendation is to hang from a horizontal bar placed high on a power rack. To make this even more effective, weights can be hung on the legs (say twenty to thirty kilograms). This will decompress the spine. As an aside, I personally like to do a lot of overhead presses. I supplement these with incline and flat benches because this not only overloads the deltoids and triceps but it underloads the spine.

Injury when weightlifting, like all other sports, is to be avoided. The instance of injury will be minimal if you take all possible steps that eliminate the chances for them to occur first place. In short, the smart athlete wants to be recovering from heavy training sessions – not from injuries.

The post Weightlifting Injuries and How to Prevent Them appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Sports injuries are not a badge of honor. Some recreational athletes will push past their threshold and get injured, then push some more. That’s being stupid, not heroic. Progress requires consistency, and being injured is the biggest enemy of consistency.

If you’re already injured and wondering how you can still progress in your training, ask yourself the questions below.

What’s the Objective?

If your objective is to win the CrossFit Games or become world champion in any sport, then keep grinding unless your injury is serious. Competing is probably how you make a living, so you can’t afford to take time off. But even competitive athletes can only push their bodies so far before they’re finished. The wear and tear of competition often forces them to retire early. These days we have professional athletes retiring in their mid-twenties and early thirties. Performance and health do not necessarily go hand in hand.

If you’re not a professional athlete, you want to be healthy and continue training for the rest of your life. If you aren’t getting paid to do it, then you have no business pushing your body beyond its breaking point. This doesn’t mean that you stop pushing yourself, but if your body is giving you warning signals, listen to them. Stop training and go see a professional.

Listen to your body. If the objective is health, then put health before training.

(Source:  Jorge Huerta Photography).

What Can I Do to Reach My Objective?

The best thing to do for injuries is to avoid them in the first place. When they happen, they can leave you depressed and drained of willpower. They force you into a negative mental state because you feel that you are not capable of doing what you want to do. You can choose to wait around in that negative state until you get better, or you can find something that will allow you to make progress towards your goal.

Injured athletes at any level will benefit from identifying an objective during the recovery period that’s directly aligned with their original goal.

Recently, a good friend suffered a severe lower back injury. Doctors recommended he stay away from lifting weights and anything that involves high impact for at least three months. He had been preparing to compete at a big local fitness competition that will take place in six months.

After he was injured, we sat down and discussed the one thing that would bring him closer to his objective. The answer became obvious: conditioning. We decided that we would work on his conditioning through swimming and shadow boxing. Both activities are great for improving cardiovascular capacity and would cause no disturbance to his injury.

Another athlete at my box injured his rotator cuff and was completely devastated because he wouldn’t be able to lift for at least 3-4 weeks. We sat down and asked the magic question. His original objective wasn’t to compete – he just wanted to be fitter. His background was in bodybuilding, where it was all about pumping iron all day long. He wasn’t the kind that took mobility seriously, and this left him a little too stiff for his own good.

We concluded flexibility was the one thing he could work on to help him get fitter while his shoulder healed. He started going to a yoga class three times a week, and couldn’t believe the difference it made in the way he moved when he went back to lifting again.

Always ask yourself what you can do. Then focus on that thing in order to stay positive and keep moving toward your goal.

Does My Injury Demand Complete Rest?

Injuries that demand complete rest are not common. Most injuries in this category are spinal injuries, which usually require that you stay in bed for days or even weeks.

If you have a less serious injury, then train around it. Don’t be silly and go back to the gym and train through the pain to prove you are tough. If your shoulder is injured, train your legs, core, or even your other shoulder. If your knee is injured, train your upper body or your other leg.

Here’s an example of a training session for someone who has a lower body injury:

• 3×10 Shoulder Pass-Throughs
• 3×5 Bat Wings
• 3x (1-6) Pull Up Ladder
• Work up to a Bench Press 3RM?
• 10-1 Bench Press Ladder @ Bodyweight? (rest 30 seconds between sets)
• Accumulate 300sec in a Hollow Hold

As you can see, there’s a lot you can do without involving your lower body at all. This workout included strength, structural, and even strength endurance work. The same thing is true for upper body injuries.

Here’s an example of a training session for an upper body injury:

• 2×5 Wall Squats
• 3×10 Air Squats
• 3×15 Walking Lunges
• 6 Rounds of Air Squats: 30 seconds work, 30 seconds rest

Rest 3 minutes, then:

• 6 Rounds of Frog Hops: 30 seconds work, 30 seconds rest
• For Time: 800m Sled Drag @ Bodyweight

Don’t try to be tough and train through your injuries. Be smart, assess your limitations, and find ways to train around them.

Find a Way to Move Forward

Your mindset will determine whether you achieve your goals or not. Anyone who has achieved anything worthwhile will tell you that they didn’t get things right the first time. When they encountered a setback, they remained persistent, flexible, and open to feedback.

Treat an injury the same way. Be persistent about attaining your objective, but stay flexible and open to feedback about how to get there. Doing the same thing that hurt you in the first place will prevent you from attaining your objective. Find a new approach that allows you to accommodate your injury while still progressing toward your goals.

More on Injury Prevention and Rehab:

The Mental Side of Injury: How to Adapt and Overcome

The post How to Be Unstoppable in Spite of Injury appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

So with all that development and technology, why do 3 out of 4 Americans experience serious foot problems in their lifetime?

With all that we use our feet for over our lifetime, it might be better to ask how they aren’t injured more often than they are.The average person takes 8,000 to 10,000 steps a day, which adds up to about 115,000 miles over a lifetime. That’s enough to go around the circumference of the earth four times. During an average day of walking, the forces on your feet can total hundreds of tons, equivalent to an average of a fully loaded cement truck. While running, the pressure on your feet reach up to four times the runner’s body weight.

A focus on injury prevention and the type of footwear we wear is crucial to any fitness endeavor. Dr. Chris Holder wrote an excellent article on how to reawaken and reconnect with your feet, and his advice should be your first step in injury prevention.

What to Do When You Get the Boot

But what if it’s already too late? What if we have already hurt our feet or ankles and earned ourselves a very fashionable, midnight black walking boot? At least black is slimming. Since prevention didn’t work, maintenance is now priority number one. Whether you are an athlete or a civilian wearing a walking boot, it is imperative that you begin or continue to exercise. Remember, it only takes two days for your muscles to begin to detrain, and only two weeks of inactivity before they begin to atrophy.

I have had quite a few athletes come to me with preexisting foot and ankle issues; some who are already in a walking boot. Depending on the type of injury, they are usually out of most activity for 4-6 weeks, which can be devastating for an athlete’s season.

In an attempt to maintain and save some of my athlete’s strength, I created the “Das Boot” Program. This is a five-day-per-week program that focuses on upper and lower body strength, core and rotational strength, and a small amount of conditioning. Each day emphasizes a different part of the body so that the whole system remains trained. I have had a considerable amount of success implementing this program, with most of my athletes able to begin training again at almost the same point they left off before the walking boot.

Below you’ll find the program in its entirety, along with a several videos describing the exercises. Stick to this program and after you shed your walking boot, you will have a much shorter road back to full recovery.

The “Das Boot” Program

Click here to download a printable version of this workout plan.

Movement Library

How you come out of an injury all depends on your attitude:

The Gift of an Injury

The post How to Train Around a Bum Foot appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

If injury prevention works, why are footballers constantly tweaking their hamstrings? [Photo credit: Pixabay]

The problem with my bold claim was I went to work with international gymnasts and soon discovered that injuries came with the territory. When you hang upside down on a set of rings in an inverted cross, your shoulders go really up against it. Do it day after day, year after year for fifteen years and guess what – your shoulders are knackered.

Injury prevention is a term borrowed from public health, and it’s a very poor one to use when working with athletes of any level. That’s why I’m calling bullshit on all the fitness specialists and rehabilitation experts who believe they can ‘prevent’ sport and training-related injuries.

Injury is Always Possible

They can’t prevent injuries, because if you train and take part in sport at any level there will always be a very real possibility you will pick up an injury.

If you still don’t believe me, I challenge you to pick an injury, any injury, and then look at all of the injury ‘prevention’ programmes that are out there. There are tonnes to choose from. If these injury ‘prevention’ programmes all worked we wouldn’t have any football players constantly pulling up with hamstring injuries. But hamstring injuries have increased by 4% annually in men’s professional football, since 2001.¹

In the same way, ACL ruptures in netball would be a thing of the past. But according to national data from Australia, knee injuries are the most common injury sustained by netballers and netball often ranks in the top five sports in Australia for incidents of ACL injuries.² Patellar tendinopathy would no longer sideline athletes who jump a lot, but we know that the highest prevalence of patellar tendinopathy (14.4%) in recreational athletes is in volleyball players^.3 If we’re all so good at injury prevention, even CrossFit competitors would be bouncing around injury free.

It’s Time For a Reality Check

Let’s start being realistic and talk about injury reduction. You may shout at me that that’s just semantics or feel that I’m quibbling over terminology, but the reason I have a bee in my bonnet is because when you tell athletes, coaches, and parents that you can prevent an injury, you’re setting everyone up for a fall.

We need to have a reality check. The best we can do is reduce injury risk by establishing effective physical preparation programmes that improve robustness and resilience. If we get this right, we will in turn develop athletes capable of withstanding the demands placed upon their body during training and competition. If we do a really good job, the athlete will come to the end of their career without any serious injuries.

Even so, the reality remains that if an athlete’s played football, rugby, tennis, golf, or even tiddlywinks for long enough, they’re probably going to pick up an injury. We can’t prevent that. What we can do is reduce the associated risk, occurrence, and severity of injuries. It’s a subtle difference, but an important one.

References:

1. Jan Ekstrand, Mark Walden and Martin Hagglund “Hamstring injuries have increased by 4% annually in men’s professional football, since 2001: a 13-year longitudinal analysis of the UEFA Elite Club injury study.” British Journal of Sports Medicine 50 (2015) 744-750

2. Aliza Rudavsky and Jill Cook “Physiotherapy management of patellar tendinopathy (jumper’s knee).” Journal of Physiotherapy 60 (2014) 122–129

3. Max Stuelcken, Daniel Mellifont, Adam Gorman and Mark Sayers “Mechanisms of anterior cruciate ligament injuries in elite women’s netball: a systematic video analysis.” Journal of Sport Sciences 34 (16) (2016) 1516-1522

The post The Myth of Injury Prevention appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

It’s said that the day you are born is the day you start dying. But it’s equally true that the day you start dying is the day you start living.

Now before you roll your eyes at me going all Stoner Philosophy on you, I meant that literally. Every time you expose your body to a stimulus, that stimulus has an effect. Pushing your muscles past their usual load will cause them to grow. We are vaccinated against disease by exposure to that very disease. The things that threaten our organism are the same things that cause it to strengthen, to improve, to become more capable and resilient.

The healing process begins the instant after an injury occurs. Blood flow is increased to the surrounding area. Your body shotguns chemicals into your bloodstream to temporarily ward off pain and increase strength and alertness. The injured area swells to help prevent movement that could cause further damage. Specialized cells of your immune system rush to the scene, cleaning up debris and fighting infection. Other cells begin the task of replacing and remodeling the damaged tissue.

We tend to think of healing from an injury as a purely physical process. It’s an annoyance and an inconvenience; something that must be waited out or worked around. We focus on physical therapy protocols, adapting exercises, even healing nutrition. We assemble teams of doctors, surgeons, physical therapists, and coaches to get our bodies back to working order as quickly as possible. All of this chaos is viewed as an aberration from our normal routine, something that is keeping us from doing what we’d rather be doing.

If that’s your mindset when you get injured, you’re missing something. Coach Holder says injury can be a gift, and he’s right. It can be the stimulus for new growth that would never have occurred otherwise. If you focus the same intention and intensity on your rehabilitation as you do on the rest of your training, you have the opportunity to come out of rehab stronger, more balanced, and hopefully smarter.

But recovering from injury is more than physical. You aren’t fully healed until you’re back on the horse that threw you.

One of my first loves. [Photo courtesy of Pete Hitzeman]

An Unexpected Fall

A year ago, I suffered one of the most traumatic injuries of my (so-called) athletic career, on one of the easiest mountain bike rides I’ve ever attended. It wasn’t a training ride, or a skill session, or a time trial. I was helping guide a Friday social ride for new mountain bikers at the local beginner trail system. I had sat in the back of the group for most of the ride to make sure nobody got lost. As we entered the third section of trail, it was my turn to be up front, so I put a few enthusiastic strokes through the cranks and started to get into the rhythm of the first few turns.

And then I was on the ground. I have crashed on a mountain bike a lot of times, and very rarely have I not had the time to think, yep, I’m about to crash. This time, I was riding, and then I was hitting the ground. It was that sudden.

I heard my collarbone crunch with the impact. I thought the sound was my helmet breaking from hitting the ground or a tree. Then I sat up, and my right shoulder wasn’t moving very well. Reaching up with my left hand, I felt the bone poking at the skin. Nothing hurt yet, and the crash had happened too fast to get scared, so my reaction when the rest of the group gaped at me was simply, “Hey guys. I think I just broke my collarbone.”

Masking Fear With Determination

That was on a Friday. I had surgery the following Wednesday to plate the four pieces of my clavicle back together. The next Monday, I was back in the gym, working with my coach (who is also a physical therapist) to create a plan to keep me as fit as possible while the bone healed around the repair.

This is where I got scared. I had worked harder than ever through the previous winter, and had been rewarded with the strongest spring I’ve ever had. I was setting PRs everywhere. I was stronger, faster, and leaner than I had ever been, and was just getting into the meat of the training program for my first marathon. Not training in June and July would make my chances of a good race in October very difficult, which was bad enough. But I was more terrified of losing the progress I had already made.

Those fears were mostly unfounded. My coach is a genius, and worked intensively with me to preserve strength wherever possible, and even improve in some areas. I did thousands of reps of every variation of lunge you’ve ever heard of. I put my road bike back on the trainer (a heinous crime in the summer) and used it for interval workouts. Two weeks after surgery, I was gingerly riding on the road again. Two weeks after that, I was able to run again. At six weeks post-op, I turned in a 5k within two minutes of my previous PR. Two weeks after that, I was able to pull 95 percent of my deadlift PR.

Suffice to say, my recovery went well.

Still, time was short until my marathon, and I was having problems building up the mileage on my abbreviated schedule. My summer of crap luck continued. I was attacked by wasps while mowing my lawn; I burned the sole of my right foot stepping on a hot coal; I got moved to night shift at work. I had another crash, this time on my road bike, that left a deep bruise on my left hip and jammed my left wrist. Each of these little bumps took precious days out of my already cramped training schedule.

The smart thing might have been to take a step back, maybe race the half marathon instead of the full, and take what my body could give me. Instead, I set my jaw, built up my mileage as best I could, and arrived at the start line of my first marathon under-trained, under-rested, and with some nagging overuse injuries. The outcome was inevitable: I had a very good marathon for the first 18 miles, and then the wheels fell off. I struggled across the finish line on nothing but determination, and then had my wife drive my battered body back home.

Proof of my busted collarbone. [Photo courtesy of Pete Hitzeman]

A New Outlook

The penalty for my training transgressions in the second half of last year was that I had to spend almost three months hardly training at all. I tried to get back at it in November, and ran a 15k that left me hobbling for weeks. Finally, I got the message, and took most of December and January completely off, only training sporadically in the gym.

All that time off meant starting almost completely from scratch for 2016, and with a new mindset. Gone were the big, scary goals that had driven my training for the previous four years. They had been replaced by a single idea: get healthy. All I wanted out of this year was to get back to the levels of performance I had attained before my shattered collarbone threw me into a tailspin the year before. And I wanted to do it smarter, because I had come to understand that the number of times I could ask my body to put out more than it was capable of was dwindling.

The first target was running. I dipped my toes back in with little two-mile shuffles around the neighborhood. They felt awful. It was like my legs had forgotten how to do this “running” thing. But over a few weeks, my legs and lungs started to come back. By April, I was getting close to being back on form, and proved it by eking out a PR in my comeback half marathon.

But I still wasn’t all the way back. I was still scared.

Work had taken me to the Carolinas, home to some of the best mountain bike trails on the planet, and I was riding none of them. My bikes felt foreign to me, and while I had put a few miles on my road bike since my accidents, I had ridden on dirt exactly twice. Both times, I rode like a newborn giraffe, awkward, stiff, and wide-eyed.

Letting Go of Apprehension

There isn’t a training plan for overcoming fear. There are no programming tips or apps for your phone that can heal the damage that happens inside your head when a freak accident breaks your body and turns your life upside down.

Part of my problem was that there wasn’t an error I could point to that caused my crash. I wasn’t attacking the trail, I wasn’t in a race, I wasn’t riding a section that was above my skill set. I hadn’t even been going fast. My front tire simply crossed a smooth, wet stone and flew out from under me. I had ridden across that very stone dozens of times before without incident. There was nothing to anticipate, no area of fitness or skill to improve. It was just a mistake.

Mine was a unique brand of fear: I wasn’t afraid of the crash, or the pain, or even the surgery. I was afraid of making a mistake that would have me starting all over again, again. I was afraid of having to do all that horrible, uncomfortable comeback work just to get to where I already am, instead of making strides toward where I want to be.

So this spring, while I dutifully put in the hours to get my running back to where it was, I eyed my bikes in my apartment with something between trepidation and longing. My mountain bike, especially, had become a stranger to me.

Me, post marathon. My smile is one of relief, not of pride. [Photo courtesy of Pete Hitzeman]

Testing the Waters

But mountain biking was the sport that got me into training in the first place, and first loves never really die. So I started easing back in, the same way I’d introduce a brand new rider. A new rider isn’t learning if they’re scared, and won’t come back unless they’re having fun. So it was time to do fun and easy. I took a few rides on jeep trails. I drove to a local mountain bike park and putzed around, walking over anything that made me the least bit nervous, and promising not to get mad at myself for doing so. I even allowed myself a mental crutch, putting new wheels and tires on my bike to inspire more confidence in its traction.

Finally, I found what might be the only beginner singletrack trail in all of North Carolina. A few weeks ago, I drove up there for the express purpose of riding the beginner trail until I was riding, not just trying not to crash. It didn’t work that day, so I went again. By my third trip, I was finding a little mojo again, even taking a few easy jumps and riding sections I would have walked a month ago.

I’m not all the way back yet. I’ve never been a particularly brave rider, but I know what it’s like when my riding is on form. I’m not at that point, but I’m on my way. The healing process continues.

Fight Your Fears

What I’ve learned from all this is that the healing process sometimes isn’t over when the stitches come out, or when your physical therapist clears you to go nuts in the gym again. Just as bones continue to heal for years after they’re broken, it can take a long time before you are mentally back in the game at the point you were.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. If you treat your injury as the physical and mental setback that it is, and address both aspects of the injury, you have much less to fear. My mistake in the months after my crash was that I didn’t have a plan for my mind, only one for my body. Once I recognized that, allowed myself to acknowledge that I was still scared, and came up with a plan to address it, I could make progress again.

This winter, I will likely have surgery again to remove the plate and screws from my collarbone. There will be another period of rehabilitation after that, but it no longer scares me. The experience of overcoming my injuries from last year has taught me that they are nothing to fear. While my body may always carry the scars, and my mind will never forget the crash, I know now to plan for both sides of my recovery.

Are you ready to face your fears?

How Deadlifts Saved My Life

The post Get Back on the Horse appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

There is no better teacher, no better coach, and no better motivator than a big injury. None.

Injuries are something you are going to have to deal with from time to time. But after the depression of losing a season due to injury subsides, many athletes discover a fire in themselves that they never knew existed. The injury becomes a catalyst to greater things. Post injury, athletes often experience levels of success they had only dreamed of before.

Your injury can destroy your mindset and your progress, or it can be the greatest teacher you ever had. The difference is in your approach. 

The Good News

Besides something catastrophic like a broken back, neck, or major head trauma, nearly every injury can be worked around. Even quasi-serious injuries like bulging disks, broken bones, and tendon/ligament tears can be navigated so that the athlete does not have to enter early retirement. One of the coolest articles I’ve read on Breaking Muscle is Andrew Lock’s brilliantly written piece about how he rehabilitated a lifter back into shape after suffering from a dreaded spinal injury.

Even if the injury you are managing right now appears insurmountable, a return to what you love is closer than you might think. With some level-headed thinking, a sound game plan, and as much positive thinking as you can muster, you can still have years of healthy training in your future.

Injury Teaches Body Awareness

When it comes to injuries, we can learn a thing or two from martial artists. Something that all martial artists have in spades is body awareness. I’ve been blessed to train the Chinese internal martial arts with one of the greatest fighters in the world, and the level of body awareness I developed over six years of training was uncanny.

Internal martial arts create an extraordinary level of proprioception, or understanding of where the body is in space. When I studied Baguazhang, the practice of bagua circle walking taught me to understand details like the position of my right pinkie toe when I take a step. This level of internal attention creates a high degree of spatial and physical awareness, and sets the stage for an awake fighter.

The only thing that can compare to this level of training is an injury. The pain of an injury can be an incredible teacher. Pain is a message, telling you something is wrong, or reminding you of an old injury and to not make the same mistake again. The vast majority of us don’t have a coach who stands over us, counts each rep, and critiques each and every movement. Pain can be that coach. You have no choice but to listen.

Using your rehab time to become more aware of how your body moves can help you prevent future injury.

Injury Helps You Unlearn Poor Movement

If you are currently managing an injury or have healed from something big, how many of you can attribute it to poor movement? I would venture that most of you can pinpoint the exact moment when the injury happened. A bottomed-out squat position where your pelvis rolled ever so slightly, or a pull where your thoracic spine buckled a few millimeters.

The recovery period is a chance to head back to the drawing board to devote time and energy toward reworking faulty movement patterns. It gives you the opportunity to train bodyweight exercises, and break down movements into individual pieces to analyze how each part functions. Then you can work on making the appropriate fixes, one step at a time.

Rehabilitation can be the most valuable period in your training career.

Dissecting the way you move will likely uncover weaknesses somewhere along the chain. Once you identify the muscle groups that weren’t pulling their weight, you can begin to incorporate the appropriate corrective exercises to those areas to prevent repeat injuries.

We all have weaknesses that we aren’t addressing because we would rather bench or squat. But since you’re sidelined, use the time to fill holes in your game. If you screwed your knee up and need to stay off your feet, train your pulling strength. If you have a low back injury that is keeping you from doing what you want to do, develop your grip strength. There is always something you can do to train around an injury.

Injury Helps You Become a Student

Some of the most educational times in my career were when I was down for the count. I wanted to get back to training as fast as possible, so I studied everything I could find about my injuries. I learned all about back injuries, torn pecs, strained hamstrings, and how to rehab a surgically repaired shoulder. With the endless stream of information at our fingertips, you can become a minor league expert on anything if you take the time.

But don’t rely solely on what you read on the internet. A great coach, physical therapist, or sports medicine professional can provide invaluable information during these times. These folks have dedicated their lives to movement and injury rehab, and you can learn a great deal from them.

Learn everything you can about your injury, both from study and from the professionals treating you. 

Tips for Making the Best of Injuries

Dwelling on what you can’t do when you’re sidelined won’t make you heal any faster. These tips will help you make the most of your injury:

• See a professional. Get to a doctor, a physical therapist, or a sports medicine specialist to evaluate the injury right away. Don’t self-diagnose or assume a few days off will fix everything.
• Take time to reflect on what went wrong. Think about how you were moving at the moment of the injury. You may be surprised about what you can recall, and more importantly, pinpoint exactly where the breakdown happened.
• Find a training partner or a coach to evaluate your movement. If you can’t move slowly with impeccable form, you certainly can’t do it quicker under load. Take this time to prioritize the appropriate fixes.
• Learn everything you can about your injury. A sea of information exists on every injury imaginable, so invest some time and read about mechanisms of your injury, common rehab exercises, and ways to bulletproof your body so there is no “next time.”
• Stay positive. Time heals everything. If you need surgery, get it. If you need to take an eight-week layoff, take it. Your body is a remarkable machine and remember, this too shall pass. Get through the low times as fast as possible and make a game plan for a triumphant comeback.

Taking My Own Advice

I wrote this article because I am presently going through it. I have a battered back after years in the trenches as a football player, and I recently entered the electric-shock world of sciatica. At my son’s final flag football game of the season, I sat in a camping chair with my hips considerably lower than my knees for more than an hour. I stood up and haven’t been the same since. But guess what? I’m planning the biggest comeback of all time.

An injury is not the end of the world, but chances are you got lucky this time. A bigger, nastier injury is on the horizon if you don’t sort out your poor movement issues. Get the help you need and identify where your movement is breaking down so you can solve the problem once and for all.

More Tips on Dealing With Injury

• The Mental Side of Injury: How to Adapt and Overcome
• Healthy Healing: Nutrition for Surgery Recovery
• 5 Injury Prevention Exercises to Build Bulletproof Athletes
• New on Breaking Muscle Today

Photos courtesy of Chris Holder.

The post The Gift of an Injury appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Actually, I’ve had a lot of injuries over the years. All except for one came from playing sports. It’s a fact: sports are a blast, but they will injure you eventually. Sporting activities take place in an uncontrolled environment, often with other players. We tend to reach past our limits when playing sports. Injuries are bound to happen.

Injuries Are Frustrating

I understand injuries are frustrating. They can be career-ending, life-changing, and life-threatening. But you have to develop a certain mentality when it comes to injuries. This mindset is what has made my experience different from many other people I know. I will not let an injury keep me down. I will not use it as an excuse to stop training.

Injury can be like a mental bomb going off in your head. So you need to get your head on straight to deal with it. Here are some strategies to work through the mental side of injury.

Stop and Evaluate the Injury

First and foremost, if you get injured in some activity or while training, stop and evaluate the situation. Too many people push on in their sport and turn a not-so-bad injury into something much worse. Don’t be an idiot-hero.

So, stop. Evaluate the injury. Does it need immediate medical attention? Well, go get it. Or do you just need to go home and treat it with ice or heat or massage and anti-inflammatories? Once you know the extent of the injury you can formulate a plan to get better.

“An injury can be a permanent setback or a gift. It’s all in how you look at it and how you respond. It’s your choice. Choose wisely.” 

Sometimes you can “train around the dragon,” so to speak. In other words, you may be able to train areas around the injury and help speed the healing process and also maintain physical strength and mobility. For example, I remember Steve Cotter mentioned he improved his pistols (one leg squats) when he injured his arm or hand. When others in his training class were doing push ups, for instance, he did pistols. So rather than stop training altogether, he did what he could and exercised other areas of his body. This can also help you stay in the game mentally and not get too depressed about your injury.

The True Goal of Physical Therapy

What if you need to go to a physical therapist? Don’t be an idiot. Just go get the PT done. Often people who need physical therapy sabotage themselves. They will do one or both of two things:

• First, as soon as they start feeling better, they will quit going to the PT and not finish their therapy. This is just stupid. Finish every scheduled session of your PT until they clear you. It’s like a round of antibiotics. Finish the complete prescription.
• Second, the few who actually finish all of their PT sessions often stop caring for that body part after they are cleared. Once again, this is totally stupid.

PT sessions are not designed to get you back to full strength and mobility. If you used to squat 405 for 5 reps and then tweak your back playing soccer, the PT is not going to help you get back up to that 405 squat. They will help you overcome muscular imbalances and compensations you may have acquired while dealing with the injury. They will help you get back to a base level of strength so you can engage in normal activity. These normal activities are things like walking or bending and reaching.

So, while visiting the PT, be clear on what you want to achieve. Ask your PT if and when further training at home is merited and how to do it. A good PT will help you with this. The few PT’s I’ve visited were happy to give me suggestions for things I could incorporate after all my PT sessions were over. If your PT won’t help you with this, it’s the same solution as anybody else who does a poor job – fire them and find a better one.

Long Term Attention

When the entire PT is done, you must continue to strengthen that area and the surrounding areas to mitigate the chance of injury recurring. Thus, you will need to change your programming to incorporate specialized exercises for the injured body part or joint or area.

These can be used as a warm up or at the end of the training session. You can also sprinkle these movements between other exercises instead of just resting on a bench between sets. You might do them while watching TV or incorporate them in a morning recharge program. See what works best for you. Realize you will need to give specific attention to build and maintain strength, flexibility, and mobility in that area – probably for the rest of your life.

Use Alternate Exercises and Implements

Consider whether or not it might be helpful to use different exercises and/or implements than you did before. Maybe a back injury precludes you from ever doing ATG heavy back squats. So what do you do? Instead of forgoing squats altogether, perhaps you can combine kettlebell goblet squats, a favorite from Coach Dan John, and something like Bulgarian split squats (rear foot elevated split squats).

“See it as an opportunity to overcome a challenge, seek out new ways of training, improvise, adapt, and overcome. You might surprise yourself and others at what you can do.”

Maybe you had a shoulder injury and can no longer press big weights overhead. Perhaps bench presses make your shoulder really ache. Don’t be an idiot and stubbornly refuse to drop those exercises because they never bothered you before. Maybe push ups, handstand push ups, or one-arm overhead presses will work. Get ups and windmills will help you re-establish shoulder stability and could be coupled with fly-type movements.

Gift or Setback?

Injury is not the end of the world. See it as an opportunity to overcome a challenge, seek out new ways of training, improvise, adapt, and overcome. You might surprise yourself and others at what you can do. You may even discover a hidden talent you may never have realized otherwise.

An injury can be a permanent setback or a gift. It’s all in how you look at it and how you respond. It’s your choice. Choose wisely.

More on dealing with injuries:

• 7 Reasons Your Injury Isn’t Getting Any Better
• The Risk of Injury in Competition and How You Can Protect Yourself
• Starting Over Again: 6 Lessons Learned From Injury
• New on Breaking Muscle Today

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post The Mental Side of Injury: How to Adapt and Overcome appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

I’m by no means injury-prone, but having been involved in combat sports and skateboarding for most of my life, I’ve had plenty of chances to work around injuries. I think having specific strategies for when you find yourself on the sidelines is the kind of thing people involved in any physical endeavor can benefit from. Since I haven’t seen this issue specifically addressed in the Natural Movement community, I’d like to share a few of the methods I practice to accomplish this.

You’re not completely out of order, even if you’re injured.

1. Study Your Craft

Luckily, in keeping the generalist spirit of MovNat, we have plenty of crafts to study. I advise taking your injury downtime to either study your worst subject or simply work on the one you are able to perform within the limits of your injury.

In my case, I can walk and crawl without too much trouble, so I’m in the process of researching these subjects, particularly crawling. My study takes the form of practicing different variations, various practical scenarios (and some not so practical), and digging deeper into the work my peers and predecessors have done.

“There is a rich library of human movement to observe and study online and, in the absence of people crawling around you in person, you can learn a ton here.”

When practicing variations and exploring different situations, my goals are to find as many ways as possible to perform whatever task I have set for myself (perhaps trying to crawl under my dining room table to make sure the bolts are all screwed tight) and to focus on how best to develop certain qualities – to be more efficient, to have more physical control of myself, or to develop endurance to hold myself in a certain position while I perform the task.

When digging into the work of others, I often start with Google, YouTube, and online discussion (Facebook, Twitter, online forums). There is a rich library of human movement to observe and study online and, in the absence of people crawling around you in person, you can learn a ton here.

2. Visualize

I first started implementing visualization practices into my training as a means to prepare for Brazilian jiu jitsu tournaments. I found it the perfect way to work through problems, get in extra repetitions, and practice matches while sparing my beat-up body more stress.

“In my experiments, the more I can “‘be there,’ the more productive my sessions tend to be.”

The rules are simple: picture yourself doing the activity you are working on. The more vividly you can experience the scene, the better. Try to replicate the feel, smells, and sounds as accurately as possible from a first-person perspective (I have heard of people practicing from an observer’s perspective but I haven’t tried this so I can’t comment). In my experiments, the more I can “be there,” the more productive my sessions tend to be.

I’ve approached visualization in three ways:

1. Simply sitting in a distraction-free place with the lights turned low. Sitting seems to work better for me than lying as I’m prone to falling asleep.
2. Running on a treadmill while visualizing, which will sound like blasphemy to the Natural Movement purist, has been very helpful to me. It’s a way to add a movement component to the visualization while being in a safe environment. I’ve had quite a few near misses with automobiles when I tried visualization while running outdoors.
3. The final method I use is to “shadow move” while visualizing. Boxers do this while shadowboxing, grapplers while shadow grappling, and I’ve even seen rock climbers do a limited version of this while working out a route in their heads before climbing. There’s no reason you can’t apply this same technology to other movement skills. This has been the most rewarding and fruitful way for me to visualize while injured.

Shadowboxing is one example of a type of visualization I like to use.

3. Make a Challenge Out of It

One of the drills I had my students do from time to time in my Natural Movement classes and I still use in my BJJ classes is to have them handicap themselves. By binding an arm, or only using one leg, or closing their eyes, they simulate the challenges of having to perform a skill without their full abilities. The student is forced to adapt and find other ways to perform the same tasks.

“The auxiliary benefit of this is a heightened sense of how important the missing limb/sense is and a clearer picture of what exactly that limb/sense does.”

This forces changes in body mechanics and strategy, and sometimes requires students to come up with ingenious solutions to these problems. Sometimes these solutions can influence the way these skills are performed when the use of all limbs is permitted again. The auxiliary benefit of this is a heightened sense of how important the missing limb/sense is and a clearer picture of what exactly that limb/sense does. When grappling without using your arms, for example, you develop a sharp sense of how to use your legs and body position to accomplish your goals.

You Can Always Get Better

What I’m getting at is this – there’s always something you can do to improve. Recovery is important, but if you get injured, there are things you can do to keep yourself in the game. These are just a few of the things I borrowed from my grappling practice and implement into my Natural Movement training when I’m injured, but these are also things you can do when healthy to prepare for times when you are injured. Or you can use them simply to enhance your practice in new ways.

More Like This:

• Starting Over Again: 6 Lessons Learned From Injury
• 3 Steps for Returning to BJJ After Injury
• 7 Reasons Your Injury Is Not Getting Any Better
• New on Breaking Muscle Today

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