Injury can be incredibly frustrating when it comes around. It can stop you from training and impact on your work and day to day life. If you’re like me, someone who loves to train and relies on training as a technique to help manage mental health, it can be so frustrating when you need to take a break… but today I’m here to ask, do you really need to stop? And furthermore, are you actually injured? A few months ago I wrote a blog about lower back pain (If you haven’t checked it out, I highly recommend you do so, just click here.) and tried to use that blog post to educate you guys on different types of lower back pain and why there often isn’t any structural damage done. Today we’re going to break down the perception around injuries and differentiate stiffness from pain. We’ll also touch on some important points on risk management and how to give yourself the best chance at staying injury free! Let’s jump right in with this week’s life update.
Guys, some of you may know from last week’s post, I spent last weekend in London and had a blast!! Man, it’s just such a cool place! I didn’t have too much of a plan (Which is rare for me, I love plans and structure, so this was definitely change) and I just wondered around, ate some good food and drank some nice coffee! On Sunday, the Seattle Seahawks were facing off against the Oakland Raiders in Wembley Stadium. This was my first time at Wembley, what an impressive stadium! Most importantly though, Seahawks got the W, a blowout win that keeps them in the hunt! I was on such a high after watching my favorite team play so well and the next day I got to train at W10 Performance. JC, the owner, runs an incredible facility with top class coaches and members who throw themselves into training! Again, the vibes were through the roof and it just added to the great break I was having. Anyway, I got home Monday night and woke up Tuesday morning to the sad news that Mr. Paul Allen, the man who owned the Seattle Seahawks had un-expectedly passed away. I don’t live in Seattle and I’m not from Seattle but I have family who call that place home, just like Mr. Allen did and he did amazing things for that city, one of them being when he bought the Seahawks and kept them in Seattle. Paul Allen was the co-founder of Microsoft, along with another guy named Bill Gates… maybe you’ve heard of him! Like Gates, Allen gave huge amounts of his fortune away to charities and different causes. Usually I relate this life update in some way to the topic I’m covering for the day but really I just wanted to highlight a man who did so much good in the world and impacted my own life in ways he never even knew. The more Paul Allens in the world, the better.
DOMS Does Not Mean Injury
Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness or DOMS for short is that stiffness you feel after you train. Usually it comes one 1-2 days after training. It can make you feel tighter than normal and also make the muscles more sensitive to touch. However, this is good. This means we’ve stressed the body enough to bring about the need to adapt. We’ve talked about this in our recovery blog (Here). The best way to overcome DOMS is to move in similar patterns to the ones that caused it in the first place. By working the muscle through the same range we’re getting blood flow to the area and that’s going to help clear away any byproducts left hanging around while also delivering nutrients to the muscle.
Without education and a pre-warning, newbies to resistance training my feel DOMS = damage or injury. However, this is 100% not the case. As I said above, DOMS needs movement to release it, injury on the hand, can be defined as anything that stops you from preforming and makes you take time off from your normal training routine. We make a big effort in ABC Gym to educate all of our members that a bit of discomfort is okay and we don’t need to panic about it. In conjunction with Tommy Brennan at the Pain and Performance clinic we’ve come up with a system that helps the member differentiate pain from discomfort.
It’s important to remember that the body does not like being put through discomfort and training really pisses it off. The mind sometimes acts the same way, suddenly you feel this stiffness that’s not normal and the brain thinks ohh crap, I must be injured. DOMS is not the enemy and you are not injured. A good warm up can often get rid of that sensation and get you ready to go again. Even just getting out and going for a light walk or swim can do great things to loosen up our body, not to mention the mental benefits we can get from being out in nature!
Load Management for Injury Prevention
Injury, particularly non-contact muscle injuries, come about when a particular muscle experiences a sudden change in the amount of load and work it’s being asked to do and it’s just not strong or conditioned enough to handle it. In this case, load does not mean a physical weight sitting on it, but the amount of stress it’s under. Load can be found using a simple method that many intercounty teams use to track their players.
You multiply the RPE of a session by the time of that session and bingo bongo, you have a session load. The RPE or Rate of Perceived Exertion is basically how hard the participant found that particular session. Usually it’s on a scale of 1-10. In order to get the most accurate results for this you need to build up a bit of a data bank of info so you can pick out red flags.
A simpler way, particularly for beginners, is to track how often you train. If you are going to join a gym for the first time in 5 years and you have done zero exercise since, 7 days a week may bring about an injury. On the other hand, if you start with 2-3 times a week you can build it from there. I recently picked up a small injury in my hip, nothing crazy bad but it’s there all the same. I started running about 6 weeks ago and all was fine, then 1 week I trained 5-6 days in a row between running and in the gym. This would not be my normal schedule at all. A week or so later I felt the injury coming on, my body was just giving me a warning, “Hey buddy, you keep going like this and I’m going to breakdown.” I took my rest and got advice from my physio and I’m nearly back to 100% with minimal damage done! For future, I know I need a rest day in-between most sessions.
Managing your load and making sure you get adequate rest and recovery is key to long term body health and staying clear of injuries.
Risk Management and Injury
The last topic I’m going to discuss is around the risk/reward ratio of certain exercises and how common sense can keep you out of a lot of trouble when it comes to injury. Again, I’m speaking here in relation to newbies to training but even experienced individuals need to check their ego from time to time and hold back.
Resistance training is hard, exercises you perform in the gym are hard and can be difficult to execute correctly. Add that to the fact that there is a lot of crap out there on the internet these days that is downright stupid and has no place in training and you’re left with a disaster waiting to happen.
Whenever you’re looking to choose some exercises to do or put in your programme you always need to judge the risk vs the reward. Squatting while standing on a stability ball is probably high risk… in comparison, a counter balance squat is high reward. A good coach will know all this but if you’re training without a coach this concept is so important.
Risk/reward goes far beyond exercise selection. Knowing when to hold back on adding extra weight is important but can be difficult for some people. Are you really going to sacrifice your technique for an extra 10KG on the bar? There is a time and place for new PR attempts but every single session does not have to be a PR… that’s where the load management comes back into play. Aim for a 5-10% increase in load every couple of sessions but know there will be times where you plateau. When you do, just ask your coach to switch up the programme.
Be realistic with your own fitness levels.
Know your limits and focus on technique.
Make recovery a priority, get 8 hours sleep as often as you can.
Eat fresh, get lots of protein and as much color into your diet as possible, especially post training.
All these things add up to keep you injury free and progressing towards your fitness goals.
I hope you enjoyed this week’s post guys. If there are any requests, please feel free to send them in via the comments below or by contacting my directly via the contact form at the top of the website or via social media (links are at the bottom of the website).
In the words of Pat McAfee, Let’s have the best week in the history of weeks,
Rory.