Weight Training Injuries

As we train, overtrain and push through plateaus, we're bound to stumble across some injuries. They come in all shapes and sizes, and range from muscle tears to tendonitus. Failure to warm up, sudden cooling off, overload, improper movement and poor nutrition all contribute to injury, one of the masters of the training experience.

Pain demands our attention and causes us to totally focus on the injured area. Using the focus of pain, learn to "feel out" the injury, feel its depths and discern its severity. Learn to separate the positive pain of deep muscular burn from the warning pain of injury. Develop sensitivity toward the quality of pain, its varying levels and degrees.

In working an injured area, use lights weights and high repetitions. Slow and concentrated reps will enable you to pinpoint the injury and determine your body's limitations. This also warms up the area and provides the support of blood with its life giving oxygen and nutrients.

Unless the injury is radical, I work through it and around it. Enduring the pain and not wanting to further abuse the area, I begin to compromise and, in compromising, discover new movements. I find I'm able to arrange a groove to work just outside the direct pain area. This often requires an abbreviated movement, a subtle change of angle or grip that I may enjoy and retain as a standard in my workout.

An injury can be the result of accumulative tears not repairing, with one rep serving as the final overload. Or it can be the result of doing a movement improperly with poor form, or from not warming up. Any injury is a learning experience, and if you let it will teach you its lessons. Slow down and re-evaluate your movements and the manner in which you perform them. In wanting to work the muscle in spite of the injury, you learn to really focus and not abuse the injured area. It reveals to you a degree of your perseverance, the ability and willingness to work through pain - carefully and hopefully.

Certainly to a bodybuilder an injury means an immediate loss of hard earned gains, but is also seem to be the only time I truly learn anything new about my body. I wish I could be as attentive during all my training as I am when I'm working an injured area.

An injury brings about a new appreciation for the muscle, and when you are healed and can life full bore, it offers a new thankfulness with less taken for granted. The new awareness for the muscle is never lost and remains as a reflection of your training forever.

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