“injury Bug Begins to Hit Sixers”, “Utah Jazz Hit By Injury Bug”, “USF’s Vanessa Johnson Beating the Injury Bug”.
Now that’s what I want to hear, somebody beating this nasty scourge! We hear this all the time in sports; teams getting decimated by injuries to key players as if they were attacked by a communicable disease. Is it just bad luck or is there more to it? Injuries are a part of sport and in exercise, after all.
As in team sports, the “injury bug” can hit individuals but it is almost entirely preventable. How? Here are a couple ideas.
1. Check your ego at the door when you train. Know when to stop. Did you just hit a PR in an overhead press? Great, you’re done. No? So go ahead and do that one more rep with only 5 more pounds on the bar and then “fight the good fight” when it stalls instead of racking it. (Rotator cuff injury).
2. Pay attention to your form and listen to the cues of your training partners or strength coach. This is especially true when doing an exercise like say, a heavy safety bar squat with chains that you seldom, if ever do. (Compressed thoracic vertebra and ligament damage).
3. Training through an injury instead of around it is never a good idea. When you have already damaged ligaments and possibly compressed a vertebra, front squats, deadlifts and overhead presses are not helpful. If you find that you cannot train around an injury, (or won’t, because you’re too stubborn), then just give it a rest! (partial tear of levator scapulae).
4.Charging into an exercise without a sufficient warm-up is a sure way to invite the injury bug into your life. (strained oblique muscle).
5. Do a movement that you sucked at the first time and got injured doing. Try it again another time without taking the corrective form measures and re-injure the area (groin strain).
Do you you get my point? (Do I?) By now you probably have surmised I am writing from the personal experience of shitty gym decisions. Make better decisions if you want to stay injury-free. At the very least, have just one injury at a time, don’t pile them up!
An ego check, good judgement and a little luck will go a long way!
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