WEIGHT TRAINING PAIN AND INJURY

Pain and injury, though not our chosen friends, serve us well as masterful teachers. We are bound to treat these miseries with ice and rest, and unless the case is of major proportions, as little training time off as possible. Through training, blood laden with life giving oxygen and proteins will flood the damaged tissue to accelerate the healing process.

Aerobic exercise at this time is especially good for us. The stimulation provided will lift our spirits while it raises the core temperature of the body preparing the muscles and joints for specific exercise. We find that warming up the injured area makes it more receptive to exercise allowing more range of motion with less pain or risk of further damage.

Pain is the signal and ultimately we guide ourselves through what exercises or portions of exercise we can perform. This takes the ten big ones: experimentation, focus, concentration, careful assessment, instincts, guts, will, perseverance, patience and courage. We use machines where we once used dumbbells, 10 pounds were we once used 100, a partial movement repeated slowly around the pain, not through it or it sends it's unmistakable instructive signal. To accomodate our need to press on, we invent new ways to position our bodies, arranging the resistance in a particular way to recruit the desired muscle without impacting the injured area.

Time goes on, the injury heals, the pain is gone and forgotten. But the wonderful new exercise whose name only you know remains, the new humility you've been granted is evident to only the survivors.