Injured, Hurt or Fu%&ed up?

 

By

Dave Tate

 

Injured – this is the normal stuff advanced lifters deal with from day-to-day. It doesn’t hinder your strength, doesn’t get better and doesn’t get worse. This can be sore elbows, shoulders that hurt when you sleep or just about anything else that hurts during your first few warm-up sets, but gets better with each set and by the time you get to your work sets, you don’t notice it at all. For many lifters the best they feel is while they’re training. It’s the rest of the day that is rough. I’m not saying you should ignore these issues, but there are those things that just come with the territory. Ice, heat, stretch and do more warm-up sets. Usually these things will work themselves out over time…or get worse. For me, most worked themselves out over time.

Hurt – This is when something tears, pulls, strains or leaves you with some limited mobility. These are much harder to train around because there’s a loss of function. It is best to take some time and rehab these unless you’re hard-pressed and don’t have enough time because of a meet that’s coming up. This is where I feel I personally made some of my biggest mistakes. I’d tear a pec five weeks out and instead of resting and rehabbing, I found ways to work around it. This is the same with shoulders, hamstrings, lowerback, ect. Some of the times I could pull it off and still hit PRs, but in almost all cases what I had to do to get ready and stay training did more damage in the long run. I don’t regret my decisions because it helped me so that now I can access and help others who get caught up in the same situation. NOTE: If you’re an advanced lifter and do get asked about how to work through an injury, you are at risk for the advice you give. I HIGHLY suggest you know and trust the person and always say “this is what I did” don’t ever tell them to do anything. NEVER answer this for complete strangers you don’t know.

F**Ked Up – This is when there are permanent issues that will change the way you have to perform a lift. Some example are bones spures in your elbow, wrecked shoulders, hips and so on. Many of these can be fixed, but will require surgery. Sometimes the surgery will help, but even after that and the rehab you will still be slightly f**ked up and will have to modify and make changes to your training and/or technical form.