“If you seek your limits, you will find them.”
- Mark Reifkind, Master RKC
For whatever reason, people have learned to equate exercise with pain, injury, and an assortment of other ills. My guess is that since the woefully generalized slogan “No Pain, No Gain” became the rallying cry for gym rats who are now gurus on all things nutrition and fitness (because they read Flex magazine once or twice), we’ve been on a downward slide toward pain, tweaks, and injuries as the norm. Since the general consensus is that exercise is great for your health, and that since pain is an unavoidable bi-product of exercise, we have to learn to live with it and just train through it.
“Does anybody else smell that?”
Crippling yourself in an attempt to squeeze out one last set or one more rep in the name of your health and fitness is counterproductive and illogical. How fit do you think you’ll be if you’re constantly hurting yourself? If you want to lose fat, get strong, etc., you have to work at it consistently. And what sense does it make to force yourself into a long, slow recovery so that you can start from the beginning over and over again? Square one is a perfect launching pad, but a bad headquarters.
Injuries come in all sorts of nasty flavors – overuse, traumatic, from imbalances in your body, etc. etc. and a lot of things can lead to them, such as training to failure (a weird concept anyway), blindly following an exercise program that’s not right for you, or just doing something stupid. All of these suck, but I can tell you from experience the last one is especially un-fun. And I know, because despite not having suffered a training injury in years, I’m sad to say that I was recently guilty of that last one.
On something of a whim, I decided to set up a set of makeshift rings for dips and hang it from a door gym I have.
This idea seems legit.
I loaded myself up on the shaky “rings” and had at it. It was an awkward setup, and I was straining way harder than I should have. But rather than stop at the first sign of trouble, I kept going. I don’t know which rep did me in, but I can tell you how many I did.
Four.
Four reps was all it took. When I got off, I could tell I had jacked something up. My upper back felt like it was folding in under my right shoulder, and as the days went on, it got worse and worse. It came to a head when I lay wrong on a friend’s couch and was greeted by a black hole of pain when I stood up. I couldn’t lift anything, even with my uninjured side. It hurt to move my neck, it hurt to move my arm, and if I relaxed my shoulder girdle it was as if someone was jamming their finger in a bullet wound. The diagnosis I got from my doctor was that I had some knots in my back that were likely pulling on a nerve or nerves in my neck, causing neck, shoulder, and arm pain. This was around the November 28th. I wasn’t able to start training regularly until January 9th.
If my written description of my pain doesn’t tug at your heartstrings, let me put a dollar amount on it that will tug on your purse strings.
Trip to the doctor’s office: $30 co-pay
Massage therapist: $37
Visits to my chiropractor: 12 x $60 co-pay = $720
Visits to another (better) massage therapist: $230
Total cash blown on a preventable injury: $1017
Over a thousand dollars out of my pocket because I didn’t stop when I knew I should have. That money could have been spent on any number of more worthy things. Instead, I was forced to spend it on limping my way back to Square One.
Unless you’re an elite athlete creeping up on a world record, a major competition, or some other worthy goal, is it worth your body and health (and greenbacks) to do something risky enough to injure you, whether it’s for a month or a lifetime? Is it worth it to give up what you love doing for any amount of time because you hurt yourself doing it? Is it worth it to wake up in the middle of the night to shift around in bed so your pains won’t bother you as much? Is it worth it to wake up in pain every morning?
I pride myself on remaining injury-free for years, and can tell you from this experience that my answer to all the above is NO. Being patient with your goals, knowing when to come back and try another day, and valuing consistency over intensity are principles you should enshrine above all others in your training. Seek your limits at your own risk.
If you’re reading this and you currently have an injury (or all this injury talk is just bringing back bad memories), you’re probably gonna need some comfort food. I have the perfect, simple recipe for you. For this recipe you’ll need:
1 dark chocolate bar (I prefer Ghirardelli)
All natural or organic peanut butter
Some crushed walnuts.
Using your uninjured arm, break the dark chocolate bar into squares. Spread as much or as little peanut butter as you want on top, and add the crushed walnuts on top of the peanut butter. That’s it! Your masterpiece should look like this:
See you next week, folks! I promise I’ll have a more upbeat blog.
Until then, lift heavy and eat healthy!
Aleks Salkin
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