You’d be surprised how often gym owners hear this.
“I sprained my wrist” or “my knee has been playing up” or “my shoulder is really niggly” are also very common ones too. But it’s not the injury that’s the frustrating part for the gym owner. It’s that the initial reaction is stop training. That as soon as we hit one little speed hump, we pause and take time off. And this mindset is often made worse by the accepted way in which to handle any injury you might have:
- You get a niggle or injury, sometimes through training sometimes not
- You go and see your doctor
- Your doctor tells you to rest
- You want to follow your doctors orders so you cancel or put or gym membership on hold
But there is an issue here. Actually, there’s more than 1 issue. Firstly most doctors are not physiotherapists or exercise scientists or even just people who recreational participate in fitness. Therefore they don’t understand how important training is for your overall health and what they’ve been taught is simply how to treat the patients symptoms, which is pain, and the most straightforward way to do that is to stop doing anything that might cause pain. And often this is interpreted as “stop doing the thing altogether”. Secondly, the belief that rest is best is an issue as our bodies need movement to heal recover and survive. Movement really is medicine.
Now I’m not in anyway detracting from what doctors do or saying that you shouldn’t see them but I do realise that they have such a large scope of practice (basically everything) which means that they then just have a basic treatment method for certain things like joint and soft tissues that can happen due to physical activity. I’ve seen and know many coaches, Physios, Chiros, Osteos and massage therapists who are probably more well equipped to help you not only recover from an injury but continue to make overall progress whilst working through it.
So what would be a better method for reacting to an injury? Well we first need to identify what your actual goal of training is and why you do it in the first place. Some people might have very specific goals like competing in a certain sport and chasing certain numbers in lifts or being able to achieve particular movements but for probably 90% or more of the population the overall big goal and reason why they train is to be healthier. To be healthier means to be stronger and fitter.
So if our overall goal and reason why we train is to be healthier then why do we let ourselves be convinced that stopping for any reason is going to keep us moving towards our goal? And are we really going to let one injury or niggle stop us moving forward towards that goal? So when an injury strikes, what if we instead react this way:
- You get a niggle or injury, through training or not
- The first thing you do is inform your coach
- Your coach helps you come up with a plan to keep training and if possible to rehab the area
- If needed, you seek further medical advice and treatment whilst working with your coach on how you can keep training the rest of your body whilst you treat the injured area.
You see, the hardest part of an injury is always the mental part. The demons and negative voices start to kick in big time and we have nothing else to do but to listen to them. They convince you to stop, that you need more rest, that whatever caused the injury is dangerous and you shouldn’t do it again. And this is the part your doctor won’t help you with. But your coach will. They’ve been injured before and they kept going. They’ve trained people through injuries before. There’s a good chance they’ve trained someone through the same injury that you have right now.
To give you a further understanding of how many options there are when it comes to finding different ways to train through an injury I’ve listed below how much one limb is as a percentage of your whole body:
- One leg represents 18% of your whole body
- One arm represents 4.5% of the surface area of your body
I’ve listed limbs here because the vast majority of injuries from physical activity will occur on limbs. But now you see how crazy it would be to stop training when over 80% of your body can still be used and made stronger!
I could talk about how crazy it is to stop training for a single limb injury until I’m blue in the face. But that won’t get anyone anywhere. So instead here is a couple super simple examples of how myself and my coaches modify injuries that we see on the daily.
- “I can’t run because of shin splints/plantar fasciitis” “Easy! Jump on a bike, rower or skier”
- “My knee hurts when I go too deep or do single leg movements” “Let’s reduce that depth, give you a depth target to hit and keep most movements with both legs for now”
- “I’ve got a shoulder impingement and it hurts to go overhead” “No worries, let’s turn overhead pressing into push ups or bench press if pain free, snatches to cleans and ring rows instead of pull ups”
I could go on for a while here but these are the most common ones. Training through injury really is just part of training in general, everyone will have to do it at some point. Don’t be someone who only trains when everything is going right. Because if you do, you probably won’t train that often.
I truly hope that I can change the limiting beliefs of at least just one person and keep them training.
If you’re feeling lost and struggling with and injury, please reach out. I’d love to help.
