The Mental Aspect of Injuries
Injuries can mess you up in ways you never knew existed.
Whether it’s a back, shoulder, knee, elbow, wrist, ankle, neck, hand, foot or even a head injury, you know the pain goes beyond the body. Your mind gets a great wake-up call as well.
How do you respond?
Do you rest and lay around, hoping for the best? Time will heal all wounds and you’ll just slowly start back up and get right as rain in due time..
But is that what happens?
In my experience, injuries have a great capacity to derail your training, your plans and your lifestyle in the future. It doesn’t have to be that way, but it usually is.
If you’ve been working especially hard in the gym and you suffer a back or shoulder injury that flips your world upside down.. you may become depressed. Lose hope. Gain weight. Figure all your hard training was for nothing. You’re going to lose all your gains.
This happens quite easily. You find yourself in a rut. Feeling like you lost control. Your sense of pride, confidence, strength, have all been tested. They may seem fragile.
This is what a tough injury can do to you. And it happens to all kinds of people. Athletes of the highest caliber find themselves lost and miserable when they no longer have the outlet of training their body or being able to play their sport.
The Fear Factor
Depending on the nature of your injury, you will have fear to some degree. You might be worried you will get hurt again. Or your weakened state will put you at risk to hurt something else.
It could be that you have fear of doing the movment that injured you. Or you are afraid of doing any exercise that targets the injured area.
These are all reasonable thoughts to have. They don’t have to be a problem but often they are. These fears can become monsters.
You want to use the injury as fuel. As a teaching moment. Pain can show you what complacency or success never could. What is this particular injury showing you about your body, your training, your lifestyle and your entire life?
What is seen as a devastating injury can lead you to a crossroads. You get to choose which way to go. The way of self-pity and weakness. Or the way of strength, transcendence, overcoming.
Subtle Movement
When you hurt a joint your initial reaction is to do this subtle movement with the area. Naturally. No thought involved. Your body just acted. Your body wanted to see what you could do. How far can you move. What’s the range of motion. Almost as a reassurance to you that you are ok. And to immediately begin to move.
Movement is crucial to healing and coming back stronger from any injury you have.
One mistake that is common in many rehab models is focusing on just the area that is injured. This approach puts a limit on what you can learn from this experience.
If your knee is hurt, you need to work on every area around the knee, behind the knee, under the knee, above the knee joint. The entire leg. And the other leg too. And all the way up and down the chain from feet to hands.
There’s a weak link somewhere and it is in your best interest to work on the entire body. It ALL needs to get stronger.
Healing Requires Intensity
Many PT routines are overly cautious. It’s almost as if they think the human body is so frail they can’t possibly push it too hard or it will break again.
The problem with this approach is that the body only adapts to stimulus you give it. If the stimulus is not challenging enough, the adaptation won’t be as strong as you want.
You need to push hard. Safely, yes, but with intensity. There are ways to rehab injuries that are safe but require tremendous effort and determination.
When you see an athlete recover from a debilitating injury and come back to play much faster than anyone had anticipated, this is due to intensity, focus and pushing the body to adapt to great stimulus.
Isometrics and Sleds
Let it be said here that every injury is different, just as everyone person is unique. Every plan to overcome an injury and get stronger will be personalized.
With that being said, two of the essentials for most people would be isometrics and sleds.
Almost everyone can do some form of isometrics and sleds. Yes, there are always exceptions but most likely you can do some form of pushing or pulling of weight, and various isometric exercises.
If you have a broken leg, sure you might not be able to do any sled training.
The exercises you perform will vary and this post is not meant to tell you exactly what to do or how to do it.
If all you are broken and can’t perform much resistance training, can’t push or pull a sled, there are always isometrics you can perform, along with some movement training that some like to call “mobility work”.
I can’t stand that term honestly, but there’s no easy way to sum it up and people need a phrase to use I guess.
The combination of intense isometrics and some high-rep mobility exercises will get you moving in the right direction. Push forward to overcome the injury and become even stronger than you were before you got hurt.
Whatever it takes
When I hurt my lower back for the first time I had no idea what to expect.
I had a good amout of fear and trepidation. I didn’t want to do anything to make it worse.
From what I knew, I was supposed to rest and let it heal. That was not a good plan. It wasn’t long before I was researching everything I could find on the low back.
What were the causes of back pain, back injuries and why was it so hard to find a definitive solution?
This experience led me down a path of experimentation that has continued until this day.
Inside the unbearable pain that I felt for many days, I found myself desperate for answers.
At that point, I started to embrace a “whatever it takes” mentality.
But to me that meant anything but drugs or surgery. In my mind, those were not options for me. So I began to implement everything I found that made sense.
The experiments went on for months. I learned more than I ever would have any other way.
Pain became my teacher.
And many lessons did it have to teach.
Eventually I discovered the way.
One of the main contributing factors in my search and success was the mindset of “whatever it takes”.
If that meant 1000 reps of bodyweight goodmornings three times a day, so be it.
I had to know. And the only way for my stubborn ass is to do it on my own. In my own time. For my strength, understanding and transcendence.
You may or may not feel the same. But that’s what it took for me.
My methods are my own.
With bits and pieces of wisdom that I pick up along the way, either from other coaches, teachers or from nature and my own trials and errors.
Injuries and pain can be triggers.
Sparks. Transformative events.
If you let them.