Unfortunately, when working out, no matter how careful you are or how good your technique is, sometimes, small injuries do occur. Maybe you didn't warm up properly, maybe you overtrained a particular muscle, maybe it was really cold outside and there was a window in the gym that was slightly open, causing your muscles or tendons to stiffen up, or maybe you just have no clue how the hell the injury happened.
The point is - ouch - now something hurts. What do you do?
Now what? Well, my advice would be to rest for a couple of days, if possible, get some anti-inflammatory medication, and see if the pain goes away. If it does not, the best thing to do is to go see a doctor.
Some people tend to neglect small injuries and keep training. That's a very bad thing to do. For example, say you have a small tendon inflamation because of an exercise that put too much tension/pressure on it. If you continue training (regardless if it's the same day or a couple of days later) you risk to break said tendon and ... you're screwed. This requires surgery to fix.
Another example is if you pulled a muscle. If you don't fully recover and continue training, that pulled muscle can become a muscle tear or it could break something else - all bad things that you want to avoid like the plague.
Let's say you went to the doctor, you got examined and now you have a treatment plan. Stick to it, whatever that may be. Once you are recovered, here's where most of us tend to mess up.
We get back in the gym after a week or two (or more, in some cases) and we tend to train exactly like before we got injured. Same exercises, same number of sets/reps, same weights. Yeah ... that's a bad ideea, regardless of how long you didn't train.
GO EASY for a week or two. Just because the pain is gone, doesn't equate 100% of the time to a full recovery of the injury you had. My advice is to be extra careful, reduce the weight and, also, it may be good to decrease the number of sets and/or reps.
Also, depending on the injury, you may want to replace some exercises; for example, if you had a front delt injury, instead of doing dips, stick to narrow grip bench press or some triceps pushups.
It's a temporary adjustment, for a couple or a few workouts; it's not a big deal. The idea is to slowly but safely get back to where you were at, before you got injured. Don't be impatient with this. Reinjuring the same muscle or tendon in a realtively short amount of time, can put you out of the gym for months or, in worst cases, it can end your weight-lifting journey.
Some of you might think ... "if I don't lift for X amount of time, all my gains will vanish."
Well, if X is smaller than 3 months, your muscles may lose some of their strength and size, but here's the good news. Our bodies are extraordinary; we have this thing called muscle memory! In simple terms, the muscle cells that you managed to build before your injury don't just disappear. You will be able to "regain" all you've lost during your recovery in a fraction of the time that it took you to build those muscle cells in the first place. So don't freak out 😀 Just remember to take it easy and give yourself time.
Even if you can't lift for 6 months or an year, you will still be able to "recover" your gains faster than it was the first time around.
Also, just because you can't do strength training, this usually doesn't mean that you can't do other exercises, such as cardio; I know, it's not the same thing, but the point is that you can still do something to keep yourself in shape if you can't lift.
Trust me, I know how it feels. I had a couple of injuries that prevented me from training for months. The first injury was caused by a pec fly. I overextened and a tendon from my shoulder got really "upset" about it. This kept me out of the gym for 4 months.
Second injury, although it wasn't caused by training, kept me away from the gym for 3 and a half months. I had surgery to fix a broken meniscus. To be fair, even with a cast on my leg, I still did my best to perform some exercises with dumbells, resistance bands, or some seated lat pulldowns. But I couldn't do a "normal" workout for like 3 and a half months, because I just couldn't stand or put all my weight in the injured leg.
Look, I get that what I just said here can be classified as common sense for most people. However, when it comes to gym rats, we have a tendency to push ourselves to the breaking point. I am also guilty of this. Growth happens only with disconfort. But there's a fine line that we should not cross; there's a reason why the saying "safety first" is so popular 😀With that said, safe training / quick recovery, for those of you that are "enjoying" some unplanned time off.
Comments
Post a Comment