A Powerful, Commonly Overlooked Tool For Recovery.

 

Accept That You’re Injured – A Brief Physiotherapists Perspective

 

If you’re struggling with acute, sub-acute or chronic injuries that are knocking you off form, then I would suggest checking out these 5 tips to recovery to start with 🙂

After that, read and ruminate on the information below, then try and work towards accepting your limitations.

 

Acceptance

Accepting that you’re not on top form all year round is incredibly challenging for even the most elite of athletes. If one does not accept this fact of life, it can (and quite often does) have a deleterious effect on an athlete’s performance and life outside of the gym.

 

*Disclaimer*

If you have the genetics of the Greek God of Thunder, Zeus himself, then disregard everything I’m about to say.

You can probably also disregard the below if you’re living in a perpetual state of misery due to year round calorie deficit, training twice a day/seven days a week and consuming copious amounts of Uncle Joe’s Cough Syrup to the point where your every orifice and pore is sliced and diced.

*Disclaimer*

 

If you’re a normal bod like myself, try not to worry about putting on a few pounds, having your VO2 max drop or your 1RM squat sinking to the deepest depths of the ocean. If you have put in gym work long term, you will get back to being a gym master once you address your injuries.

If you haven’t put in the long term work, also try not to worry! If you address your injuries and limitations at the start of your training life, then you will be in a much better place to progress because you will be building a solid base that won’t be knocked down so easily in years to come.

Accept that you may have to drop the intensity, volume or completely change up the type of exercise you need to perform in order to recover. But remember, this will (in the majority of cases) be temporary. Temporary could be one week, one month or even one year. If you focus on the above, you will recover and eventually be in a better, stronger, more mobile position than before to get back on the gain train.

 

 

That old school mindset of Mickey, Rocky’s tough as old boots trainer, is outdated, risky, based on survival of the fittest and has huge attrition rates due to injuries. Gritting your teeth, pushing through the pain and thinking you’re entire being is composed of adamantium is a fast track route to never being on top physical form.

Now don’t get me wrong, there are times where the ‘no pain, no gain’ attitude will help to build strength and fitness – however the key thing to question here is the severity, intensity and nature of the pain (Google ‘SIN Factor’).

If the pain is merely delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) that settles in a few days… happy days! If the pain is something that just seems to persist despite all your efforts to fix it, you need to address the issue.

‘Pushing through’ will likely just exacerbate things, cause a whole heap of compensatory mechanisms long term and there’s a high probability that it will compromise your ability to ever fix the true source of the problem. If you want examples of what ‘pushing through pain’ does to those mere mortals amongst us, just check out some of the hundreds, if not thousands, of men and women who were subjected to the Bulgarian Method of Weightlifting back in the 80’s.

On that happy thought… until next time, signing out 🙂