Work Out of Injuries, Not Through Them
I’m not a physician, and I can’t give specific medical advice. But as a person that has struggled with a laundry list of injuries (nerves, bones, joints, tendons), I’ve had plenty of opportunity to learn from my own stupidity. By behaving like an ignorant asshole, I’ve come around to seeing the light:
“Plow through.” “Power through.” We’ve all heard these catch phrases applied to everything from the work day to a dull party. But when it comes to injuries and your workouts, this mentality is just plain wrong. Don’t think of being hurt as a swamp that you have to slog across or “power through.” All that will happen is you will sink into greater injury, reduced performance, and more time away from the gym. You will stop your progress (and maybe lose your gains) if you try to power through injuries, as if they were not there.
Artax: your gainz sinking into the swamp if you try to “power through” an injury. Atreyu: how you’re going to feel watching your gainz go away.
Instead, think of injuries as a hole—one that you climb up out of and leave behind you. The way is up, not across.
Being hurt is like falling down a well. Your performance is down there in the dark. You need to build a ladder to bring your game back to where you need it to be. It means (if possible) working your injury specifically, rather than trying to exercise as if it wasn’t there by forcing yourself to ignore the pain. For example, a few months ago I went a little too quickly and too heavy on a deadlift set. Too much weight led to poor form, and I could feel my lumbar muscles begin to spasm, cramp up, and seize. Anybody that has experienced this knows how crazy it feels, and knows that a little bit of panic starts to set in. In this situation, I had three options. One, leave the gym and find a quiet place to moan while the cramps and spasms rendered me immobile. Two, “power through” the rest of my DL sets, ignoring the pain and risking the high likelihood of an injury that could take me out of the gym for God-knows-how-long. Three, climb out of the hole. I stripped the bar down to less than half of what I was lifting, and returned to my sets. Slower than slow, focused on form, concentrating on mind-muscle connection, centering on stretch more than flex, and letting the minimal weight on the bar pull by body’s motion into the proper mechanics. This was no longer about building strength, but about correcting injury and preventing it from getting worse. I finished out my workout like this, leaving no rep undone. I have no doubt that if I quit lifting that day, I would have been frozen in agony from the cramps for days after. And I have no doubt that if I tried to finish my sets while ignoring the pain, I would have been in the emergency room before the night was over. I took the third option, instead. I worked up and out of the hole.
Your ability to perform is down there. Build a ladder out of good information and determination, and climb out. Don’t pretend you’re not in the hole, and don’t decide to stay there!
Make no mistake, this is mindset. And part of it comes from how we accept and recognize pain. The gym routines push us, they break us down. They hurt. But that hurt is not pain. Or at least, don’t think of it as pain. “Pain” is a word to reserve for your body telling you that damage has happened that will limit your performance, and that you need to address with urgency. Think of what we regularly feel in the gym as “discomfort.” Muscles screaming after that last rep-out-to-failure? Discomfort. Woke up so sore you couldn’t believe it? Discomfort. Stomach twisting because you banged out a morning workout and then passed up that big carb-a-thon lunch? Discomfort. And this is as it should be. “Comfortable” is a fat man in a baggy sweatshirt.
Power through discomfort. Work out of pain.
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