How To Work Around Pain and Injury

Injury and pain are unfortunate but normal side effects of human movement. There are, of course, ways to minimize them, but we cannot eliminate them completely. Rather than assuming we’ll never get injured, it’s best to have a game plan for when injuries inevitably occur.

Minimizing Injury

Pain and injury are typically the result of doing too much, too soon. In other words, you did something your body was not prepared to do.

The best way to minimize injury is to make sure the demands don’t exceed your capacity. Here are some key ways to do that:

• Start with weight that’s well within your capacity in the beginning.

  • It’s always better to do something you know you can do and progress from there than to start with a gamble.

• Increase weight in very small increments.

  • I recommend 5 pounds for most lifts and 10 pounds for bigger lifts that feel easy. Being too conservative has little downside while being too aggressive almost guarantees time off from training due to soreness or injury.

  • You can also try double progression, which means adjusting the weight and reps independently. If going up in weight makes it impossible to do the same number of reps, drop the reps. Once you get back to the original number of reps, you can go up in weight and drop the reps again. This spreads the stress out and can make progression more manageable.

• After a layoff, drop the weight in proportion to time off.

  • After taking a week off, you might need to only drop the weight 5 pounds or so, but the longer you go without lifting the bigger your drop will need to be. There is no standardized relationship between time off and percentage reduction, so use your best judgement. I would decrease the weight as much as you feel like you need to and increase if it feels too easy.

• If you feel something isn’t right, don’t push it.

  • I often use the term “tweaky” to refer to the uh-oh feeling you get when injury feels imminent. Advanced lifters know this feeling well, like if you move the wrong way something bad is going to happen. Suffice it to say, if you feel this way, don’t push it.

  • You’re also not always going to feel perfect, and if your threshold for discomfort is so low that you never advance an exercise, you won’t get stronger. Getting stronger is necessary to help prevent future injury and pain as it gives the tissue more resilience.

  • As you advance as a lifter, you’ll learn to distinguish between manageable pain and pain that’s telling you to stop.

Adjusting Your Workouts

When an injury or pain inevitably occur, these are the primary ways you should look to adjust your exercises/workouts:

Decrease the Load

In my experience as a coach and lifter, reducing the weight of the exercise is a good first measure. It will alleviate injuries exacerbated by heavy loads and effort.

Drop the weight only as much as you need to to alleviate pain symptoms. Some people immediately want to cut the weight in half but lowering too much can reduce the tissue’s capacity and reduce tolerance, which can increase the risk of re-injury.

Decrease the Volume

Volume in this context is the amount of sets and reps you’re doing. You can cut the number of reps to stay further away from failure—the point at which you can physically no longer perform the movement—or you can drop a set or both.

The aim here is to reduce the risk of doing too much overall work and to minimize fatigue, both of which may increase the risk of injury or cause pain.

Reduce The Range of Motion

Some pain presents only at a specific part of a movement. If that’s the case for you, staying away from that part of the movement will allow to you to do it pain-free.

If you experience pain at the bottom of a squat, for instance, you can still do squats to the point above where pain occurs. Box squats might be a good option for that.

Change To A Different Variation

Sometimes you simply won’t tolerate movements in their current form. If that’s the case, you can try a different variation of the movement.

If you experience pain during overhead pressing movements, try a landmine press or incline bench press to see if that helps. If normal squats hurt your lower back, try split-squats.

A small change in the movement is often enough to minimize pain for many folks.

All Of The Above

By mixing and matching these strategies, you can fine-tune the stress of your workouts to match your tolerance. I mentioned this earlier, but I will reiterate it here: only lower the stress as much you need to to avoid unmanageable pain symptoms.

The more you can do, the smaller the drop-off in capacity will be. If every time you start to feel less than perfect you change all of these things to the max, you will have trouble building tolerance.

Adjust what must be adjusted and no more. I think it’s unreasonable to expect zero pain as you build strength after an injury, but it shouldn’t get worse over time. Being able to do more before the onset of pain symptoms is also progress, so don’t think you’re “failing” if you’re still experiencing pain.

Summary

It’s difficult to navigate injuries and pain, especially when your first instinct is to stop everything altogether. Maintaining business as usual seems counterintuitive, but it will drastically improve your outcomes and outlook.

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please drop them in the comments or shoot me an email at bo@stansellfit.com. Thanks for reading.