Copyright © 2019 by Jujimufu
ISBN: 978-0-578-56067-0 (print)
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or
used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the
publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Table of Contents
Disclaimer and Legal. . . . . . . . . . v
Will You Overcome Training Injuries? . . . . . . vii
Part I: Never Get Injured . . . . . . . . . 1
Say No to Injuring Yourself. . . . . . . . . 3
Know Normal Pain from Not Normal Pain . . . . . 7
Don’t Step on Broken Glass . . . . . . . . 10
Warm Up Like a Grown Up. . . . . . . . 13
Don’t Rush Your Training. . . . . . . . . 16
Limit Your Training Time . . . . . . . . . 19
Don’t Do Too Many Special Exercises. . . . . 23
Don’t Accidentally Cool Off. . . . . . . . 25
Do Dangerous Stuff Before Safe Stuff. . . . . 28
Get a Life to Avoid Injuries. . . . . . . . 31
Part II: Oops! You Got Injured .
Injuries are Distractions. . .
Show the Pain Who the Boss Is.
Should You See a Doctor?. . Train When You’re Injured . . Recovery is a Learned Skill. . Refuse Assistance from Others. Do the Math for the Long Run. .
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Part III: Conclusion .
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Appendix I: Some Stuff I Learned.
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Appendix II: Interviews . . . . . . . . . 89
Devon Larratt—Professional Arm Wrestler . . . . 93
Magnus Midtbø—Professional Rock Climber. . . 101
John Wayne Parr—Professional Muay Thai Fighter . . 107
Antoine Vaillant—Professional Bodybuilder. . . .113
Martins Licis—Professional Strongman. . . . . 121
Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson—Professional Strongman . . 129
Stefi Cohen—Professional Powerlifter. . . . . 133
Connect with Me .
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DISCLAIMER AND LEGAL
In reading this book you, and any you teach, understand and
agree to the following terms: that you/they will not hold the
author and his affiliates responsible for any direct, indirect,
incidental, consequential, special, exemplary, punitive, or other
damages, under any legal theory, arising out of or in any way
relating to your use of this Book/eBook and its information, or
the content, even if advised of the possibility of such damages.
The author shall not be liable for any physical, psychological,
emotional, financial, or commercial damages, including, but
not limited to, special, incidental, consequential, or other
damages. The information contained herein is meant to be
used to educate and entertain the reader and is in no way
intended to provide individual medical advice. You agree to
take full responsibility for your decisions and actions.
All diet and supplement advice in this book is not intended
as a substitute for the medical advice of qualified medical
practitioners. Any products, supplements, and services
mentioned in this book are not intended to diagnose, treat,
cure, alleviate or prevent any diseases. All content in this Book/
eBook are the opinion of the author who does not claim or
profess to be a medical professional providing medical advice.
Advice from your professional medical advisor should always
supersede information presented in this book.
You understand and agree that you will indemnify, defend, and
hold Jon Call (Jujimufu), its creator, and his affiliates, harmless
from any liability, loss, claim, and expense, including reasonable
attorney’s fees, arising from your use of his Book/eBook
OVERCOME TRAINING INJURIES
v
products, or your violation of these terms and conditions. Jon
Call assumes no responsibility for the exercises, practices, or
behavior of any kind, or implications of them, described herein.
vi
OVERCOME TRAINING INJURIES
WILL YOU OVERCOME
TRAINING INJURIES?
Hi! I’m Jujimufu. I’ve been making crazy, funny training videos
for 20 years. Even before YouTube existed, I was making videos
and posting them online on various websites.
Since exploding on the internet, I quit my day job and now do
fitness entertainment full-time on social media. Training has,
for me, become my job. Now I have to be more careful than
ever because if I get injured, it’s bad for business. Fitness is my
business and livelihood. My family, friends, and fans depend on
me staying healthy to build and share value. My cats rely on me
making money to feed them and pay for vet bills. It would be
selfish of me to get hurt doing something without some careful
consideration. Injury = Hungry cats.
What am I doing to stay injury free now that it’s more important
than ever? I want to answer that question thoroughly, so I
wrote this book!
Look, we don’t have a choice whether or not an accident
outside the realm of training afflicts us. (Getting hit by a boat,
stepping on a poisonous frog, slipping down an escalator). But
we can still try being careful when we can. Especially in the
realms of training: we can considerably reduce the chances
OVERCOME TRAINING INJURIES
vii
of hurting ourselves while continuing to train by adopting a
workable set of beliefs and behaviors that protect us. Part I of
this book will take you through the most important concepts
of injury prevention.
Regardless, injuries and accidents will happen. No matter how
hard you try, if you’re trying hard when you train, an injury
will occur. Part II of this book will help boost your recovery
confidence; this will get you moving in the right direction
towards a speedy recovery.
We’ll conclude with an important message. In the appendixes,
you’ll find more cool stuff that’ll educate and inspire you. Such
as interviews with top performing athletes as well as a bunch of
details I’ve noticed while training that can keep you safe. With
all of this information in your hands, will you overcome training
injuries?
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OVERCOME TRAINING INJURIES
PART I
NEVER GET INJURED
Read these dozen or so headlines to help you
prioritize an injury free training life!
SAY NO TO
INJURING YOURSELF
Most training injuries happen because you don’t say no to social
pressure. Have you heard the whole “not listening to your body”
thing? “Not listening to your body” will get you in trouble, or
hurt they say. However, “not listening to your body,” just means
you were listening to something else and said “yes” to social
pressure when you should’ve said no. Why would you say yes to
an exercise or repetition when your gut is telling you something
is wrong? We’re not talking about fatigue, discomfort, or even
fear; we’re talking about that feeling you get before you do
something you don’t think you should. Why do we ignore this
and say yes? Because we want to be accepted. Because we
think we’ll let others down if we don’t do it. Don’t disappoint
OVERCOME TRAINING INJURIES
3
grandchildren or gym bros I guess. Or your followers, or the
coach, or the couch the coach is sitting on. We love that couch.
Almost every training injury I’ve ever had came from not saying
“no” to some real or make-believe social pressure. That social
pressure comes when we’re alone too. You have ridiculous
expectations of yourself, and you think others are watching
and will see you wuss out, even when they aren’t there! Here
are some things we might say to ourselves:
“I can’t be weak! I have to finish my workout routine as
programmed, or I won’t reach my goals!”
“People are watching!”
“I haven’t posted in a while. I have to make this count!”
“I can still do this! I have to prove to myself I’m as strong as I
used to be!”
“I read about this Navy SEAL guy who was tough, and if I
stop, I’ll feel bad about myself.”
Our brains are crazy. Our brains make up all these fake stories
about other people judging us. We push to transcend ourselves
and experience some sort of oblivion in a moment of effort.
We ignore that feeling that something is wrong and try to go
beyond where we aren’t ready to go yet or try to go to a place
we don’t belong at all.
WE DO THIS TO OURSELVES THOUGH! WE SHOW OFF!
Several years ago, I sprained my ankle for a second time. I was
at my first Fitness Expo as a guest, and I was “Jujimufu, the
Anabolic Acrobat!!!” … Nobody really knew who I was at the
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OVERCOME TRAINING INJURIES
time as I only had like 70k followers on Instagram, but I felt
special cause the expo paid for me to go and perform. Before I
began working on the first day, I began going to booths for fun.
I went to a jump rope booth and started jump roping to impress
people. Then I did a backflip cold and sprained my ankle. It
was a grade I sprain. I was trying to show off. I hobbled away
and the rest of the expo I had to work around that messed up
ankle. Nobody cared that I did a backflip. You’d be surprised
how much people don’t care in this regard!
Imagine you are the only human left on earth. What would be
the chances of you getting injured training? Probably very low.
Why? No rational explanation is necessary, the emotion you
get from fantasizing this is enough: you can feel yourself in
that situation and know the reality of hurting yourself training
wouldn’t be a likely thing because nobody is there to judge you.
You won’t do something stupid if nobody exists but you. You
want to learn how to say no? Learn to use your imagination!
If you can imagine your life depending on your training health
and progress, then you can imagine the threat an injury would
incur to both. “What’s the worst that can happen?” You could
blow out a knee and be sick in the head and make no more
progress if you don’t be sensible, patient, or grateful. “What’s
the worst that can happen if I don’t do it now?” “I wait another
month to better prepare for this lift or skill, so I have no chance
of blowing a knee.”
Pit your imagination against your stupidity in situations where
you are pressured from yourself and others to do something
you feel isn’t going to end well. Acknowledge that letting some
OVERCOME TRAINING INJURIES
5
people down now is better than being a whiny bitch the rest of
your life cause you had that “injury” way back when. You don’t
want to become that person. Also, hurting yourself in front of
others is a buzz kill. Hurting yourself by yourself is also a buzz
kill. Just say no to injuring yourself. Say no to everyone and
everything.
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OVERCOME TRAINING INJURIES
KNOW NORMAL PAIN
FROM NOT NORMAL PAIN
Lung breaking fatigue, massive muscle burn, towering mental
barriers: yeah that stuff isn’t dangerous. Haha. Just very
uncomfortable! Knowing whether the pain from training is
normal or not isn’t something you need to learn, you already
know if something is normal or not. You don’t need a decision
making flow chart to determine whether or not to proceed with
a workout. Even as kids, when running and jumping and doing
physical things as fast, hard, and as long as we could, we knew
whether fatigue and pain from exertion were normal or not.
If something feels wrong, stop. Don’t be a numb-skull. Ask
OVERCOME TRAINING INJURIES
7
anyone who has dislocated a shoulder whether they couldn’t
tell the difference between normal training pain vs. that
dislocation. It’s just something you know! When you’re on the
verge of actually injuring yourself and get a warning, the pain
will feel very wrong. If you don’t listen to it: BOOM!
However, not all injuries announce themselves before they
happen. I want to share two experiences I have that relate to
this. The first time I did an 800 lb yoke walk for 30 feet, was
also the first time I did a YOKE walk over 600 lbs. I had trained
YOKE just a few times before this, so I was still finding my
limits. I didn’t know I had it in me. About 30 feet into the
walk, my right shoulder popped. I dropped the YOKE, and my
shoulder had a lingering range of motion restriction for almost
a year after that happened.
The third arm wrestling competition I entered, I tried to
defend a top roll near pin against a guy nicknamed “Top Roll
King.” I wasn’t experienced enough in arm wrestling when this
happened to know what was a losing battle and what wasn’t.
That was a losing battle, but my ego got in the way, and I
wanted to make a comeback in the match to show how macho
and strong I was. So I held out for a moment before he pinned
me, and my elbow popped several times. I strained my tricep
tendons very badly.
Knowing normal pain from not normal pain is easy, but it’s
not enough. You also have to know normal exertions from not
normal exertions. If something feels wrong, is unfamiliar, or
“painful in a bad way,” then stop! If things are risky, take a
moment to strategize your safety. Are people watching? Good,
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OVERCOME TRAINING INJURIES
stop. Don’t worry about those people. You have to learn to stop
when others are watching and expecting something out of you.
They suck, remember that. Think of it as a social confidence
PR (Personal Record) when you don’t injure yourself in front of
others. Nobody wants to see you get hurt. That was something
that took some time for me to learn, but one of the things I’m
proudest that I’ve learned. Again, it means saying “NO” and
that needs to be said a lot.
OVERCOME TRAINING INJURIES
9
DON’T STEP ON
BROKEN GLASS
The word “spotter” is used both in gymnastics and weight lifting.
A spotter is someone to protect you against hurting yourself.
In gymnastics, a spotter is someone to help you complete the
rotation of a flip if you bail. Wasting your time learning solo
with mattresses, sandpits, pools, platforms, and other DIY
safety emulation methods is a bad idea because you can set
bad habits and still hurt yourself anyway (because they don’t
help you progress in getting over the fear component).
In weight lifting, a spotter is someone that helps you complete
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OVERCOME TRAINING INJURIES
a dangerous lift if you cannot finish. You can also use a power
rack’s spotting rails, or a set of spotting straps instead of a
human to keep the weight from crushing you in a lift like the
bench press or squat. Use them both. In my opinion, you should
always use spotting when you’re approaching a max effort.
Aside from spotting, though, there are other ways of improving
a training session’s safety. Clearing an area so you don’t trip
or fall on to something is an easy thing to overlook. When
I’ve practiced the snatch in the past, an Olympic lift, I tend to
fly 6 feet backward on some fails. Simply making sure there
is nothing behind me could protect me from crashing into
something dangerous.
One thing I’ve seen many people make the mistake of is
misloading plates on either side of a barbell. Make sure the
weight is the same on both sides, even if someone loaded
them for you, take a quick look. Also collars: it annoys me
when people don’t use barbell collars. If you’re one of those
idiots who leave collars off on lifts so you can “dump it” on
either side if you cannot finish, then you win the award for a
selfish tool: that’s what a human spotter or spotting rails are
for, you’re putting others in danger if leaving collars off the
barbell is your safety strategy. Putting collars on a barbell is
like wearing a seat belt in a car, there are NO drawbacks, and it
takes 5 seconds. The ROI for that action is tremendous. Think
about it, if you get in the car twice every day for a year and
it takes you 5 seconds to put on and take off your seat belt,
that’s 1 hour out of your entire year for something that could
save you from a truly debilitating crash. I feel the same way
with barbell collars, nobody needs to lose a toe, and you don’t
OVERCOME TRAINING INJURIES
11
want to be lifting weights that aren’t evened out on both sides.
One time, I was practicing my flips on a private field when I
stepped on broken glass in the grass. It sliced my foot pretty
good. Thankfully no stitches were needed, but from then on I
looked for debris like glass before jumping barefoot in fields. It
also became a metaphor for me related to checking on things
before acting. Hence, the name of this chapter.
The act of “looking out for broken glass” so you don’t step on
it is at its core, an act of looking out for anything that could
go wrong and taking the time to put things in place so that
they don’t go wrong. Just check on your surroundings before
you do dangerous things, make sure you have space, and the
ground isn’t slippery or full of glass. Make sure the equipment
is sturdy (have you ever done a box squat onto a box that
was missing one of the pins in the height adjustment uprights
underneath? Scary stuff). If you have things to protect you
from getting hurt, use them. Don’t be lazy or stupid.
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OVERCOME TRAINING INJURIES
WARM UP LIKE
A GROWN UP
The longer your warm up, the more time you have to become
aware of something being more at risk of injury. Warming up
prepares your entire body for higher levels of exertion by
several means. The amount of time you need for a warm-up
depends on many things such as the following: you’ve built
some muscle, you are heavier or taller, you trained yesterday,
you’ve developed your skill level higher than before, you’re one
year older than you were a year ago! No matter what you do,
your warm-up time will increase as your life continues; This
may sound ridiculous because it’s true, and true things are
OVERCOME TRAINING INJURIES
13
often ridiculous. Even if you do everything right, it will still take
longer for you to warm up as years pass, as you improve, or as
you get larger. Get used to it!
Short warm-ups are for children and chumps. Don’t be ashamed
if you are noticing your warm-up time increasing, and that you
are the last one to start doing things with appreciable strength
or speed in a group. Take your time, let the idiot kids rush into
it and get hurt.
The only reason you’d ever do something that you usually
warm-up for without warming up is to show off or for survival.
Think about this: if you could backflip, would you do one first
thing upon rising out of your bed in the morning, in your
bedroom, with nobody watching, and without filming it? Why
would you do that? You wouldn’t. No proof, no glory. Would
you deadlift your max cold if nobody was watching, and nobody
would be able to watch you do it? Of course not. You wouldn’t
do “your thing” without preparing for it unless you were doing
it to show off like a doofus or were late and had to rush things.
About ten years ago, I broke my right index finger doing a back
handspring. It was early in the morning, and I showed up late
to open gym time. Their scheduled time was 10 am to 12 pm,
and I was half an hour late. These times were strictly enforced!
They would kick you out at 12 pm and close the gym. I had to
hurry! Open gym was $20 for that time slot, and it was the
only time to practice on the gymnastics flooring I had each
week, so I had to make it count. I began quickly warming up
so I could make the most of my time. I rushed right into a
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OVERCOME TRAINING INJURIES
back handspring and broke my finger on the floor. I asked for
a refund because I had only been at the gym for a few minutes
and they wouldn’t refund me. I was out $20 and a good finger
all because I was late and rushed my warm-up.
Warming up is not hard or complicated; it’s the easiest thing
to learn that has to do with training because doing it right is
intuitive and sensical. Here’s how you do it: ask yourself what
you’re training today. Deadlifts? Then put a barbell on the
ground with lightweight and do that a bunch of times. Rest
even if you don’t feel like you need to between warm-up sets
because you need to give your body some time to acclimate to
the task. Look at your phone or something.
Are you feeling stiff? Are you having trouble with some part
of the movement? Cherry pick a few exercises that will help.
Ex: Upper back feeling stiff? Stretch it by doing a few thoracic
extensions on the ground on top of a PVC pipe. Can’t get
your butt to contract? Do a few glute ham raises to get those
muscles to begin firing. Just do some of it and move on. Feel
it out. Already have an injury you’re working around? Then do
something to make it feel better and get it ready, even if you’re
not going to do anything that would aggravate it during this
training session. You don’t need a separate warm-up routine
for your workouts; you need to work backward from where
you’re going and take your time working up to what you’re
going to work on! Please, don’t make this harder than it needs
to be, it’s not hard, and it isn’t fancy. Be a grown up and take
responsibility for your warm-ups.
OVERCOME TRAINING INJURIES
15
DON’T RUSH
YOUR TRAINING
If you’re strapped for time and thinking about shortening your
warmup time, don’t! Instead, keep the warmup and ditch the
workout! It takes me 30-40 minutes to get to my maximum level
on complex skills (squats, deadlifts, flips, splits!) If I have less
than 40 minutes to work, I’m not going to shorten my warmup,
I’m going to do an arm workout instead haha! If I planned to
do complex, compound skills, I’ll just warm up for those things
and not do them at maximum levels! Actually, I’m not going to
do anything at all. Ok let me be clear: If you’re serious about
strength training or skilled sports, you need to organize your
life so that you have the necessary time to warm up for them.
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OVERCOME TRAINING INJURIES
When I had an 8-5 job, I used to get up at 4:12 am every
morning, eat the same quick breakfast of grits, eggs, and coffee
and then drive to the gym. I’d get there at 5:00 am precisely,
and work out until 7:30 am when I’d shower, eat another meal
in my car, and get to work. (My workplace was 5 minutes from
the gym.) If you do the math, I had 2 1/2 hours to train. That’s
plenty. I only needed 1 1/2 hours to train. Still, I liked the extra
time to warm up (and I needed it that early in the morning
since I was doing real workouts!)
After one year of doing this, I decided to negotiate my work
hours. I changed my work hours to 7-5 pm with a 2-hour lunch
break. Since the gym was still 5 minutes from work, you can
imagine how much better it was training in the afternoon vs.
the morning for warmup time! I was naturally more awake and
alert at 11 am than 5 am for tons of heavy deadlift sets. So, I
didn’t need that extra half hour in the afternoon as I did in the
morning.
The thing I never did was try to finish my workout on a 1-hour
lunch break; it just wasn’t enough time for my skill level as an
athlete. Either I was going super early in the morning or taking
a big break in the middle of the day; This was me, though, you
may not need as long to warm up as I did.
Determine how long it takes you to train comfortably without
rushing, and TAKE THAT TIME! Don’t rush your training.
I need 90 minutes for a good plyometric, explosive training
session. I’m not going to try to do it with a time limitation of
1 hour. If you can’t organize your time or life to accommodate
the workout you need, then keep the warmup and ditch the
OVERCOME TRAINING INJURIES
17
workout. Much of the magic of adaptation and growth happens
when you ramp up to your working sets, not the working sets
themselves. Always keep the warmup, even if it means ditching
the workout.
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OVERCOME TRAINING INJURIES
LIMIT YOUR
TRAINING TIME
One of my very favorite training mindsets is using limitation.
It’s easier to romanticize about the extreme number of reps,
sets, exercises, and sessions you can have in a week to reach
your goal than it is to consider how little you can get away with
for the same result. How many reps in that epic 200 rep set of
tricep pushdowns were necessary? 196 of them? 180 of them?
Less than 100 of them?
Begin distinguishing between reps, sets, exercises, and sessions
that matter, and those that don’t. It doesn’t take a lifetime of
OVERCOME TRAINING INJURIES
19
training to be able to know when something is useful or not.
Many people I train with find it odd how I’ll stop in the middle
of a workout. “You’re done already?” … Uhhh. Yeah, it’s not
useful anymore. Either my body wasn’t in a receptive state for
a training stimulus, or I got the job done quickly. If you can get
the job done in 2 sets, don’t do 5. If you can get your result
training a movement three times a month, don’t train it ten
times a month. If you feel like you’re missing out on something,
determine whether it’s just a ridiculous feeling because you
think other people are better than you because they’re training
more, or if you really are missing something.
It is not hard to do this. Just make sure the first real set does
something that the warmup sets don’t. That means taking the
time to warm up so that when the first real set comes, it’s a real
set. To make sure real sets are real, schedule more time, so you
don’t feel like you have to rush a warmup.
If you want to be on a higher level and safeguard yourself from
injury in the process, then ask yourself a series of questions
like this:
“What if I only get to train two days per week for 1 hour each
day. What would I do and how would I do it?”
“What if, no matter what, from the time I started my warmup, I
could only train for 30 minutes. The moment the time was up,
I had to stop completely.”
“What if I just skipped the last set of 5x5 squats, and did
4x5. Does that last set matter? Which sets matter?”
“What example do I have of not having trained something for
a long time, and still, after a long break I could do it? Perhaps
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OVERCOME TRAINING INJURIES
I was stronger? Why did that happen?”
In March of 2012, I sprained my ankle because I was training
my acrobatic tricks for over three hours. My calves and ankles
began to act funny, but I wanted to keep going. I should’ve
heeded that warning because they finally gave up on me, and
the cushion of the plyo floor took my ankle into a direction
it was never meant to go. I couldn’t practice my skills for six
months after that. Had I only stopped half an hour before that
happened I would’ve been fine.
When I train my gymnastic, acrobatic tricking skills now, I
always put a 90-minute time limit on total practice time. That
90 minutes includes the warmup. If it takes me a whole hour
to get into the swing of things (and sometimes it does), then
I’ll only get 30 minutes to play in the flow state. I learned
that things got unnecessarily risky past 90 minutes, and all
the extra reps after that time were usually not useful. I began
keeping track of time while training, and when 90 minutes hit, I
would stop abruptly NO MATTER WHAT. It was a very serious,
personal rule I made for myself. The benefits of following this
rule have been very significant! I’ve never suffered an injury
tricking since then.
Let’s assume I have extra energy after the 90 minutes is up, and
I’m killing it. Do I keep going? No! Haha! Oops, I took too much
pre-workout, it doesn’t matter! 90 minutes is 90 minutes. Now
I’ll have a ton of energy to do other things after training.
All in all, the extra 30 minutes trudging around or winding
down training was never useful and would slow me down the
OVERCOME TRAINING INJURIES
21
rest of the day. It also delays recuperation (you quit sooner,
you can feed yourself a post workout meal sooner, and save
reps for tomorrow). Oh, and you know, since this is a book
about injuries, imagine if you pooled together the countless
number of useless training hours you could be saving yourself
from, maybe 50-100 hours per year just deleted. That’s 50100 hours not spent doing something that could injure you.
That’s like reducing your chances of getting in a car wreck by
eliminating 50-100 hours of driving time per year. If you could
reduce that risk without missing out on any training gains,
wouldn’t you do it?
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OVERCOME TRAINING INJURIES
DON’T DO TOO MANY
SPECIAL EXERCISES
The exercises that will serve you best in preventing future
injuries are the very exercises that are most likely to injure you.
Do you think someone trained in doing double backflips would
hurt themselves doing a backflip? No. Do you think someone
who can deadlift 1000 lb would hurt themselves deadlifting
500 lbs? Probably not. Do you think someone who can do
BOTH those things would hurt themselves lifting boxes or
jumping over their neighbor’s fence? No. Because a person who
can do a double backflip and a 1000 lb deadlift is invincible.
OVERCOME TRAINING INJURIES
23
Special exercises like bird dogs, tibialis raises, scapular
retractions, windmills, supermans, neck raises, etc. are generally
hated not because they’re ineffective, but because we just hate
them. We’d rather do double backflips and 1000 lb deadlifts,
but that’s not how things work. To do the ultimate skills, we
need to precede them with thousands of repetitions of lesser
movements and preliminary skills. The interesting thing is,
if you never attempt to do those ultimate skills, you’ll never
achieve the highest levels of bulletproofing yourself against
injuries.
The best exercises for injury prevention? Double backflips and
1000 lb deadlifts!!! AAAAAAAAaaaaaand…. Things like bird
dogs, tibialis raises, scapular retractions, windmills, supermans,
and neck raises. Yep, there is no way around it. You must do
everything. Or do you?
You can save yourself from doing too many special exercises
if you’re restricting them to only a full spectrum of the things
RELATED TO YOUR GOAL. Wanna injury-protect yourself for
deadlifting? Then backflips aren’t your go to. However, reverse
hyper-extensions might be a good idea. Along with deadlifting
a lot of weight! Do you want to protect yourself from tendinitis
from grip exercises? Then manual therapy work and extensor
training will help you. You gotta eat your vegetables too. You
can’t just eat dessert. Chocolate cauliflower is the best food
for preventing injuries. Yippie!
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DON’T ACCIDENTALLY
COOL OFF
Accidentally cooling off is one of the most dangerous things
you can do when training, especially if your training involves
explosive things like jumping and sprinting.
Have you ever had someone interrupt your workout and talk to
you about bullshit for 16 minutes? You just got to your peak,
haven’t fatigued yourself, and so you’re raring to go! But this
person won’t shut up! So your body gets cold, and you get
distracted. It’s much easier to take a punch to the gut when
you’re braced than when you’re not paying attention. This is
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25
essentially what happens when you try to jump back into what
you were doing after you cool down. You’re throwing high
levels of impact towards systems of your body that stopped
paying attention.
Coming from a background of acrobatic tricking, I’ve seen
this “cooling off accidentally” thing destroy many tricksters.
Tricksters gather for group events where 30-100 people will
crowd one gymnastics floor and throw down. That’s a lot of
people for not very much floor. Only one person can throw
at a time; otherwise, two people will probably fly right into
one another. There is no line; people just jump out and go
for it. The more timid, uncertain individuals will wait because
they aren’t assertive enough to keep jumping out to do moves.
When they finally step out, 20 minutes later, they’ve waited too
long. Because so many people are watching, they will throw as
hard as they can after cooling off. SMASH. SNAP. POP.
Do you want some timing recommendations? If I’m training
for strength with weights, I rest between 3-5 minutes. If I’m
training with heavy weights, I can rest as much as 8 minutes. I
can only do a couple of sets like this per workout that require
rest periods that long. An example of an exercise that needs up
to 10 minute rest periods for me is knee-wrapped, super heavy
squats. That’s very demanding. If I’m doing acrobatic stuff, and
I’m in the zone, I’ll keep throwing moves until I’m out of breath,
usually 2 minutes worth of doing moves without intentionally
breaking. That might be 3-6 moves or combos. Then I’ll rest as
much as 5 minutes after this series. For me, anything beyond
a 10 minute rest period for super intense efforts is rare or
accidental during training circumstances.
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Many things will cause you to cool off accidentally. If it
happens, you either have to end the workout or warm back up
with a few extra warmup sets to see if you can get back into
it. Do a substantial drop in difficulty for safety. If you’re doing
explosive skills, go back to prerequisite skills and rep a few of
those and wait until things peak again. Whatever you do, if you
were working at +90% capacity, don’t just jump back into it.
Interruptions are frustrating, but injuries are more frustrating.
Next time you have someone interrupt you to talk about
bullshit have an exit strategy for conversation. And if it’s YOU
distracting yourself with something on your phone, then have
an exit strategy for yourself. Don’t accidentally cool down.
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27
DO DANGEROUS STUFF
BEFORE SAFE STUFF
I experienced paralyzing arm tendinitis this year for an obvious
reason: I entered an arm wrestling competition with no
training! What makes it even crazier is the night before the
event, we filmed a super intense bodybuilding arm workout
video. I was very sore and fatigued from that workout before
the competition.
I was not aware how bad the arm tendinitis was until the day after
the arm wrestling competition when we went indoor bouldering
(technical rock climbing). I’m not good at bouldering, and I
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knew from experience it tended to cause great pain in my arms
from finger to shoulder. Moving around my large body with bad
technique in a bouldering gym for a video trying to not look
“too bad at this” resulted in unbelievable pain. I’ve ruptured
muscles that were far less painful.
The result from this 3-day recipe was excruciating arm pain
flare-ups from simple things like picking up boxes to moving
around unloaded barbells and plates in my garage gym. These
flare-ups and the inability to train my arms the way I wanted
lasted 3 weeks. There are many lessons to learn from my story.
The part I want to focus on now is talking about sequencing
training stuff properly in a week and a day.
Day 1: explosive, dangerous, fast stuff.
Day 2: not as explosive, dangerous, or as fast of stuff as Day 1.
For years I mixed training acrobatic tricking with heavy weight
lifting in the same week. The worst way to do it was to hit the
weights hard, get sore, and then try to do flips and stuff on
grass outside the next day. Sure, I sequenced my training this
way a few thousand times in my life. However, as I got more
experienced, I did this less. I realized sequencing my training
this way didn’t work well. If I could get away with it, the results
didn’t matter anyway, because the results were “meh.”
When organizing a week’s worth of training, put the most
dangerous, explosive, fast stuff first. Gymnastics flips or high
box jumps before heavy deadlifts. Heavy deadlifts before
bodybuilding accessory work (unless we’re pre-exhausting, in
which case the heavy deadlifts aren’t as heavy anymore). Do
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29
harder, faster stuff before easier stuff. Do shorter, more intense
work before longer bouts of stamina training. Do it by day, and
within a day. You put the most dangerous stuff in your line
up when you have the most attentive capabilities and energy
when you are the freshest; this will optimize your safety.
Conclusion: don’t have arm day before arm wrestling day
before rock climbing day. The results from training this way
aren’t good, and you will hurt yourself.
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GET A LIFE
TO AVOID INJURIES
Many are going to disagree or misunderstand my message in
this section.... Well, let’s do it anyway!
The most injury-laden individuals I’ve ever known seemed to
share a sort of similar lifestyle: messy apartment, not much
money, not many personal connections with others, fragmented
relationships, and not much going on except being wholly
consumed with the most minute details of their training. So
what’s going on here? Is their living experience trash because
training is their obsession, and they don’t care about comfort?
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31
Noble. Cool. Ok. Or is an obsession with training the reason
they live this way (and the reason they’re injured?)
You can get a success story from this formula if the obsession
is something other than selfish training pursuits. For example,
easily value-added things like… basically, any pursuit geared
towards HELPING people tends to create success stories when
they’re obsessions. However, becoming obsessed beyond
everything else with something as self-absorbed as getting a
pump in the gym or budging 5 lbs on a lift, (things that are
difficult to translate into value added for others) can make for
an awkward living experience. When training is used to vent
frustration, it will become riskier. Those self-absorbed, poor
souls hurt themselves all the time because they’re seeking
oblivion or escape. Deloads are like pulling teeth for some of
them!
It looks like a training addiction. Thankfully it’s training and
not recreational drugs, but from the outside, it might as well
look like they’re a junkie based on their lifestyle. A real training
addiction rarely works itself out to a happy ending. Of course,
a select few of your favorite athletes lived terrible, obsessive
lifestyles and approached training like someone running into
traffic, and were lucky as hell to come out of it as awesome
people. However, that’s a select and lucky few, very few. The
fewest. It’s the exception, not the norm. You’re reading a book;
those people don’t read, so you’re not one of them. The vast
majority of real training addicts, the 99% are annoying as
hell to be around, and they’re injured all the time. They don’t
have a life. The closer you get towards real training addiction,
the more ridiculous and ineffective things become for those
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individuals and those around them. Oh, and don’t think this is
the only way to be an awesome athlete. There are 100x more
examples of people who have good lives with balance that
are more successful and skilled athletes than these obsessed
training junkies.
I notice far fewer people hurting themselves when they get
older. Why? Isn’t being older a higher risk of injury?! Perhaps.
Are they training like wimps? That’s part of it, but that doesn’t
mean they aren’t getting results still. You can train like a wimp
and still get great results. Look, typically the older folks hurt
themselves less because they’ve had more time to get their life
together and form an identity instead of throwing everything
out the window but the pursuit of 6 pack abs. “When I get
six pack abs, crowds of people will part for me.” Don’t laugh,
people can think like this. I had idiotic, arrogant thoughts like
these sometimes when I was a teen.
NOBODY CARES ABOUT YOU! You aren’t a threat, a contender,
or lurking in the shadows as some unforeseen force that will
come out of the woodwork and make people feel sorry that
they weren’t training as hard as you. Dorian Yates left a legacy
in bodybuilding that sort of reads this way. He was nicknamed
“The Shadow.” Read more closely, and his legacy is only as good
as the diligence he approached his practice with. Diligence that
was only functional because he was successful at getting his
life together. Dorian networked, cooperating with people, and
paid for things he needed to be 6x Mr.Olympia. Do you think
Arnold Schwarzenegger lived in filth and made $0 and only did
bodybuilding stuff? Look up his story, every step of the way
Arnold was building the ultimate life, it wasn’t just about training.
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33
Having a life that isn’t just some forsaken training destiny, is an
important means of fully actualizing your training potential! If
you have some friends, some money, some other things going
on that make you feel purpose, that will carry over to training.
You have to care about these things too! Care for others, family,
friends, cats, and yourself. If you care for yourself, you’ll look
at your life as a rich, multi-dimensional story. Do you just want
to be someone that lifts X, Y, Z? A name on a spreadsheet for
an organization? Or do you want people to know YOU? The A,
B, C, D, E, F, and G that round out the X, Y, Z into a fantastic
almost fictional existence? You are more than the sum of your
lifts and skills; you are more than a training montage and a
collection of body part measurements. You are what you care
most about, and if you only care about training, then what
happens when you screw yourself up doing it? You’ll lose your
mind! I’ve seen it happen to many of my friends. Injury will more
likely occur if training is the only thing you care about because
you’ll train more out of desperation to escape an otherwise
crappy living experience.
Get a life! Leverage it to make your training the best you
can. Recognize it and consider it whenever you’re about to
do something risky or stupid while you’re training that could
injure you. Regardless of how good your sensibilities are, you’re
gonna screw yourself up training at some point.
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PART II
OOPS!
YOU GOT INJURED
Even if you do everything right,
you will still get injured! OOPS!
INJURIES ARE
DISTRACTIONS
Most of us experience injuries as bad because they come with
pain that can hold us back from doing what we want. They’re
also annoying and sometimes expensive. But as many wise men
have tried to point out, the greatest pleasures often come with
the greatest pains. Achieving really great things is always a
road filled with lots of pain.
But injuries aren’t just painful physically, they’re also painful
psychologically! In fact, psychological trauma can set you back
as much as any physical trauma. Compare.
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37
One month relationship breakup
= is equivalent to =
Minor knee aggravation.
Your lifetime soulmate dies in a car wreck
= is equivalent to =
Major spine injury.
You cannot convince me that breakups and deaths of loved
ones, or even bad relationships that you’ve been in for too
long, will not negatively affect your training as much as tearing
a ligament or something in the long run. Keep this logic in the
forefront of your mind so that you can adequately recognize
the millions of smaller distractions outside the realm of acute
physical pain for what they are: they are DISTRACTIONS THAT
CAN RUIN YOU.
Stubbed toe, sprained ankle, popped rib because you wore
your lifting belt too tight, food poisoning, kidney stones,
digestive disturbance from cheap whey protein, insomnia,
a hangnail, a hangover, itchy elbows, constipation from safe
toilet syndrome, your boss chews you out Monday morning
for something completely out of your control, the list goes on
and on! Do you know what they all have in common? They cry
out for your attention, they are crying out: THE HELL WITH
TRAINING, THE HELL WITH WHAT YOU WANT TO BECOME,
PAY ATTENTION TO ME!
Injury is everywhere, and it is a word of degree. What all of
these degrees have in common is that they distract you.
That’s the one common denominator between all injuries
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physical and psychological, they distract you and steal your
attention. And that is your first clue for how to deal with an
injury: TAKE CONTROL OF YOUR ATTENTION!
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39
SHOW THE PAIN
WHO THE BOSS IS
Your thinking after an injury is a muddled haze of bodily
chemicals and nonsense. To make sense of it, you have to do
something about it. That’s the part most people mess up, they
try to make sense of it first before dealing with it when
they really need to deal with it first to make sense of it.
Remember the last time you spilled rice all over your kitchen
floor? What did you do? Did you ask yourself questions like
these:
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OVERCOME TRAINING INJURIES
“What if there is rice in places I cannot see?!”
“How long will it take to clean this up?”
“Will I get all the grains?”
“What should I do about this rice?!”
NO! You muttered the word “shit,” and you got the broom and
dustpan out and went to work. You didn’t try to figure out how
to deal with spilled rice. Now think back to the last time you
hurt yourself badly, what did you do? You drove yourself crazy
with doubt and concern:
“What if it’s worse than it seems?”
“How long will it take to recover?”
“Will I ever be the same?”
“What will I do about it?”
Direct your attention away from these thoughts and outward
towards actions you can take right now. First, get help if needed
(if you can). Are you leaving the gym? Get your stuff together so
you can take it with you. Are you thirsty? Probably. Get a drink.
Not thirsty? Drink anyway. Water is a good bet. Need to pee?
Do it even if you don’t need to right now. Do you want a protein
shake or a meal? Get one even if you don’t want one, eating
after you train is the right thing to do, even if you injure yourself
doing it. Hey, you don’t want to go into shock hungry. Hah!
The point here is to show the pain who the boss is. By not being
scared by thoughts of “What will happen? What if?” and rather,
maintaining control of your attention by directing it towards
ordinary and necessary biological needs, and your next steps
towards recovering, you’re setting the tone for your comeback.
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41
SHOULD YOU SEE
A DOCTOR?
Should you see a doctor? Probably if you have little experience
with injuries, maybe not if you do. If you do, approach a
doctor’s visit like you would a chess match…
First and most importantly, a doctor may be able to determine
how badly you were damaged or what your problem is. A lot of
people have injuries that never heal well because they skipped
visiting the doctor or avoided surgery. I’ve known a lot of those
people. They never fare as well as the people I’ve known who
were not afraid to get under the knife. Don’t be cheap or shy:
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surgery can save your life and maximize your chances for a
full recovery. Every surgery I’ve had was a huge success. The
only orthopedic surgery I’d recommend getting some second
opinions on is spinal surgery (this is, of course, within the
scope of training injuries). The spine is particular and peculiar,
it’s not as straight forward as knee, elbow, or ankle surgery.
On the upside, it’s possible that the injury is not as bad as you
thought and the doctor won’t suggest surgery. For example,
in the case of an ankle sprain, the doctor may say it’s a grade
I sprain instead of the grade II sprain you thought it was. The
doctor may tell you to start rehab now instead of later. Good
news! Now get to work doing painful, tedious exercises with
stretchy rubber band thingies three times a day. They’ve always
worked well for me, and they were dreadfully dull.
Some doctors are giant assholes. Even good doctors can
have bad days. Don’t take stock of any doctor’s pessimism.
For example, the doctor I visited in the ER in 2004, after I
crushed my neck in my backyard doing a roundoff-flash kick
flip, condescendingly told me that I was too old to be doing
such childish stunts. He told me that I needed to grow up and
have more mature ambitions. One week later, I was out at a
park overcoming a newly developed fear of flips. The doctor I
visited after I ruptured my hamstring deadlifting in 2008 told
me that I would never lift as much as I did before the accident.
Six months later, I beat my old personal deadlifting record, and
all traces of that injury had vanished and never resurfaced since
then. Wow. These doctors sure were winners. Incredible. Had
I let these doctors’ attitudes discourage me, I might have set
my ambitions elsewhere: like medical school! Oh boy, I want to
OVERCOME TRAINING INJURIES
43
be a doctor when I grow up like these doctors because they
inspired me to help people!
Never accept that your setback will take as long to heal as a
doctor says it will. The average recovery timelines for injuries
are based on recovery for average human beings. Those who
train seriously are not average human beings, they are supraaverage and have extraordinary recovery capabilities (that is,
as long as they continue to train during recovery. More on that
in a moment). You should be able to recover in three weeks
instead of six! You should be able to resume light activity in
two weeks instead of four! You should be back in the gym the
very next day after you get hurt.
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TRAIN WHEN
YOU’RE INJURED
The big thing I’ve done that actually made a difference in
turning around each and every injury I’ve had, which I have told
hundreds of strangers through e-mail inquiry, which helped me
bounce back from injuries rapidly, make comebacks repeatedly,
and even changed my perspective on life itself was… When I
got injured, I trained!
Training like a lunatic around an injury allows your body to
enter into the optimal hormonal/neuronal state for rapid
recovery. While you were doing a million weighted chin ups
OVERCOME TRAINING INJURIES
45
when your knee was messed up, your whole body entered a
frenzied state that was extraordinarily helpful for your knee’s
recovery: waste products were exported more rapidly from the
knee injury; endogenous recovery chemicals and your workout
drink’s nutrients were delivered to your knee, all while you were
barking at the chin up bar.
If your hamstring ruptures, do some light activity on your poor
hammy. Get some blood flowing to that area; stimulate it but
don’t aggravate it. The blood flow is a good thing. Okay, great.
Now annihilate your upper body!
Remember this adage: train around the injury, not through it.
Don’t add insult to your injury because of impatience. You can
be aggressive while being patient. Do what you can, and do a
lot of it. Do what you can, and do it really hard. If you aggravate
the injury, you are losing.
If you can’t focus on training around your injury because it’s
still acute, then take some painkillers. I remember right after I
had my finger surgery, I refused to take the narcotic painkillers
prescribed to me post-op. I was trying to be hardcore. The pain
got horrible, and my index finger became my universe. I couldn’t
focus or do anything but rock myself back and forth in a chair
in agony. Anybody that has ever broken their index finger can
probably relate: it was my most painful injury. If rocking back
and forth in a chair wasn’t “hardcore” enough, I actually went
for a walk barefoot on hot pavement when it was 104 degrees
Fahrenheit (40 Celsius) outside. My feet were on fire.
I did this on purpose, to distract myself from the pain in my
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finger. Wow, what a bright young lad I was. When I got back to
the house, I said, “screw this” and took the painkillers. After
they kicked in, I could actually think and pay attention to
things. Wow. Then I went to the gym and worked out my legs
because I wasn’t engulfed by the pain in my finger. And then
I started my comeback. So did I destroy my liver and kidneys
forever from using painkillers for three days? No, man, no. I got
moving and was able to focus my attention on recovery and
building momentum. I set the stage for the next three months
of working around the finger.
Training around an injury is the most important thing
you can do to recover. Whatever can help you do that, use
it. Painkillers, stimulants, creativity! Get creative with your
exercises! This is the embodiment of recovery. Being so hellbent on making a comeback that you “come back” to the gym
the next day to train harder than ever in any way you can figure
out: it’s poetry. It’s a metaphor for the ultimate success as a
human being.
After every major injury or setback I’ve had since I was 18 years
old, I started training more after the incident. When it was my
thumb, I continued doing flips around it, even in a cast! In
2012 I screwed my ankle up and couldn’t jump off of it well for
six months. I got aggressive with the rings for six months. Six
months of training aggressively on the rings added 15 lbs (7
kgs) of lean upper body mass to my physique and got me an
Iron Cross. Ankle injury = Huge lean body mass gains and an
Iron Cross?! Holy crap!!!
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47
RECOVERY IS
A LEARNED SKILL
Recovery is a learned skill that you can get better at, just like
strength training. If you practice strength consistently and
diligently you improve. Much of that time is spent practicing
to solve riddles. Just as a computer needs time to “compute,”
you need computation time to solve certain riddles. That
computation time happens during many hours of training.
When you’re intentional with recovery practices and practice
consistently and diligently, you improve in part because you
begin solving riddles.
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You figure things out the more you practice. Recovery is a
practice, it’s not just something that happens automatically
when you rest. How do we practice recovery? It’s easy, let’s
write it out like a fourth grader: see a doctor, find relief, do
rehab exercises, train around the injury, optimal nutrition.
That’s about it, I guess. Or is it?
Look, some injuries, especially those pesky chronic ones,
WILL NOT GET BETTER until you make the right moves. I had
patellar tendinosis in my knees for half of my training life. It
was the hardest riddle for me to solve. I remember once I took
six months off of training in a way that wouldn’t aggravate
them to allow them to heal, and it did absolutely nothing. I
jumped right back into the pain. It took me almost my whole
life to understand why I had this problem. I will talk about
my knee problems in Appendix I in this book, but what you
need to know for now is that resting and avoiding aggravating
the problem may not work. Some injuries are resolved in part
due to things that seem really far fetched. Some injuries are
avoided by not doing specific exercises that may be bad for
YOU. Not everybody should back squat, deadlift, or bench
press the same. Maybe one of those exercises isn’t right at all
for you? Perhaps just not right now? Things are complicated
and change all the time, but you can become skilled enough to
make swift and great comebacks.
Think of the best musicians you can, think of the number of
levels they can climb and how good they can get. Start thinking
of recovering and injury management like that. It’s a skill with a
high ceiling. It’s something you can get better at. Much better
at! So do it!
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49
REFUSE ASSISTANCE
FROM OTHERS
Most of us take longer to recover from an injury than we should
because we enjoy sympathy from others. A lot of people
hesitate to jump back into training after they get hurt because
they secretly or unconsciously enjoy the pity. It seems like a
nice vacation or a nice excuse to take a break or re-evaluate
your life priorities. Well, it seems like it’s that way, but it’s
not that way. Trust me, been there, done that dozens of times
myself. Doesn’t work well. That sympathy is a line of credit
you don’t want to use. You want to recover with as much help
as you can provide yourself outside of others.
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If people are in disbelief over how quickly you’ve recovered, and
are thinking you’ve lost your mind over the frequency of work
you’re putting into coming back from an injury, and are cautioning
you to take it easy, and are beginning to suspect your injury
wasn’t as severe as it seemed, then you are doing a good job!
You are winning! Make it an art form, be the best rehabilitation
artist there is! Make peoples’ jaws drop at how quickly you can
recover from your setback. Be the person that other people
come to when they hurt themselves in the same way.
Sure, we all secretly love bragging about how bad our injuries
are. We all exaggerate. We are all insane. Bragging about how
bad your injury is, and exaggerating its magnitude, sends the
wrong signals to your unconscious mind. Doing these hinders
your recovery. Don’t brag or exaggerate the severity of your
injury. You can take a break and enjoy other people feeling
sorry for you for a little while, have your parents cook your
meals for a few days. Sit around a lot or something equally as
useless. Or you can get on with your damn destiny.
Refuse yourself opportunities for assistance within reason,
try to continue doing things for yourself. If you’re hobbling
around, continue to prepare your own food and do your own
laundry, etc. Your parents or housemates may demand that
you take it easy and let them serve you: try your hardest to
decline as much as possible politely. Accepting too much help
delays psychological recovery.
Refuse yourself opportunities to be pitied and battle your
unconscious mind’s thirst for resentment. Others may say “ok”
and let you be self-sufficient, but then at some point, you will
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51
be in a position where someone can help you but doesn’t. If you
pay close attention to your feelings, you’ll notice a mysterious
frustration can overcome you that arises because you ceased
accepting assistance. Keep that in your mind for a moment…
Perhaps people will make requests of you as if you were healthy,
and you will feel the itch to play your “injured” card and get out
of the obligation, “hey, after all, I’m temporarily handicapped,
and they’ll be easy on me.” No! Fight these psychic gremlins!
It’s a temporary, but very real insanity to refuse help but
secretly feel resentment when they stop offering that help
you’ve refused. Getting over this “temporary insanity” is vital
for your recovery. It’s crucial for your comeback! Leave others
out of your recovery as much as possible. In the long run, you
need to cultivate a higher capacity to reconstruct yourself, by
yourself. Start now. Your friends and family love you most when
you are strong, not when you are weak.
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DO THE MATH
FOR THE LONG RUN
Let’s do some math. I’ve been training 20 years now. If I ruin
my ankle and the prospect of a “full recovery” is around half
of a year… Well… What is 1/2 a year of the 20 years I’ve been
doing this? It’s less than 3% of my total training lifetime. This
is the long run perspective.
Interestingly, these past 7 years of my training life have been
some of the healthiest years for me. Ages 24-33. Comparing
these years to when I was training at ages 19-23; Reflecting
back on those early years, I was a physical wreck! I thought I
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53
was getting old when I was in my early twenties! I was wrong.
Nobody has any clue how much time their body has left. You
may have a total of 27 years of awesome training or whatever in
you. What’re 7 months compared to 27 years? It’s 2%. That’s
not much. So if you injure yourself and the full recovery is gonna
take half of a year or so, then keep that 2% time in mind. The
98% grows more and more in your favor and enriches your years
beyond comprehension. Be long. What if you only have 2 more
years of high-performance training left in you? You don’t know
what you have left! Stop playing these games. Besides, brooding
over how much time you actually have left does you no good
even if you accurately knew that number. Be long term!
And the 2% and 3% of your training lifetime thing? That
doesn’t mean 0% effectiveness as an athlete, that just means
you aren’t 100%. If 2-3% of your entire training lifetime means
you’re training at 60-70% capacity because of an injury, then
that’s better than being dead. This math will keep you sane,
keep doing the numbers it only gets better.
To most trainers, “training” is unconsciously synonymous
with “maximum performance,” anything that isn’t maximum
performance does not matter much. This is a foolish mindset,
and it’s why there are so many loser has-beens out there:
they just gave up when they peaked at their sport because
they weren’t creative enough to look at how they were still
developing as a well-rounded being. When you are injured,
you have to stop comparing yourself to your healthier states,
lower your expectations. You took a hit, you’re not as good as
you were yesterday. Eat it, lower your expectations, and move
around and beyond the injury.
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Are there some exercises you can still do without aggravating
your injury? Can you learn to train alternative exercises and
“be perfect” at them? Can you get a “maximum performance”
experience by working on things that do not aggravate the
injury? I bet you can find something to train. Invent a new
“maximum performance” scenario that accommodates for your
setback. Focus on what you can do! Get good at that! Focus
on new things during your comeback! PR again on something
you’ve never done before! And while you do this, put your
rehab into overdrive!
Let’s say you’re stubborn though, and high-performance
training = a 200 kg clean and jerk. That’s it. That’s all you
do. Cool. You are a super awesome person because of this.
Neato. You can do a 200 kg clean and jerk. That’s a heavy
lift. Wowzers. Incredible. Ok, you hit that in your late twenties.
What are you doing in your late thirties if you keep at it? Maybe
“only” a 160 kg clean and jerk? Do you know how heavy that
lift still is?!?!!! This is a pretty realistic, perhaps conservative,
estimation of how strong you can still be if you keep going.
Wouldn’t you rather have that, still, than nothing at all because
you hurt yourself some time in between these years and gave
up on it all completely? “I hurt myself, and things were never
the same, so I quit it altogether.” WHAT A RIDICULOUS AND
INFERIOR MINDSET!
You gotta care about this training thing you do, keep caring
about it. If you have to change it, then change it, but you have
to care enough to change it even if it feels uncomfortable. The
alternative to caring about training and changing it when you
must is doing nothing, and that alternative is way worse.
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PART III
CONCLUSION
Without CARE, nothing works. The real reason anyone would
give up after they experience a training setback is that they
don’t CARE. Is CARE an acronym? Why do I keep capitalizing
the word? No, it’s not a damn acronym, it’s giving a shit about
something. Do you even give a shit about making a comeback?
Why?
Why do you CARE about making a comeback? What do you
want to make happen? What do you want to prove? Do you
want to beat others in competition? Do you want to make
a training compilation video? Why did you value what you
lost? Why were you doing it anyway? If you put all this work
into making a comeback, would you be better than you were
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before? Or just, you know, maybe almost as good as you were
before? Is that enough for you? Never as good as you were
before, but perhaps almost?
Why would you CARE about making a comeback if you weren’t
progressing anyway? Maybe you had plateaued for the past
3 years, you weren’t making gains. Maybe you were getting
bored. Were you just training out of guilt because you felt like
you were supposed to do it? Why would you even CARE about
coming back to that old plateau? Maybe enough was enough.
You were at your genetic limit, you fulfilled your potential. You
got comfortable. Time to move on to new pursuits. Think so?
Didn’t someone once define insanity as “doing the same thing
over and over again and expecting different results.”? Are you
being stubborn? Maybe this injury is a wake-up call, waking
you up to other possibilities in your life? For those plateaued
souls: you keep training and training, and really, you seem to
be going nowhere with it; do you really think this training thing
is granting you your best life?
Why would you rather be making a comeback than finding
interest in something else? If you can’t train, or train quite like
you used to, or don’t believe it’s worth it anymore, why not
get into something else? Why not fulfill other potentials? You
know, give yourself a break, have a life as some people say?
Why not, at least, take time off and go with the flow and take a
developmental detour? Was training even working out for you
anyway? Was it on the downtrend perhaps? Hey. Why not just
retire?
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Maybe you already did enough. You have enough of a training
history behind you, you have already accomplished so much.
You got enough pictures and videos from the past. Are your
golden days behind you? Maybe it’s time to chill and take it easy.
Would you CARE if others saw you as a loser has-been? But
really, who gives a shit what other people think, you know?
They don’t know you or what you’ve been through. They don’t
need to know.
But you know what, here’s the catch: if you don’t CARE about
making a comeback here, why would you CARE about making
a comeback in whatever else you plan to do with the rest of
your life? When you experience setbacks or plateaus in nontraining worlds like relationships, family, health, finances,
careers, other hobbies: will you just go with the flow and take
another developmental detour? Over and over again? Detour
after detour? Find something else yet again? When does all of
this end?
It ends when you fucking die. Now burn this into your mind:
If you ever want to quit training, make sure you quit when you
are making gains again, when you are at your best, beating
your best, establishing a new best, or at least making some
sort of progress somehow, because that’s the only time you
are of a frame of mind to make any worthy decision to quit
training or not. If you actually think quitting training may be
the best decision, well, then, do it after you make your final
comeback.
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Now, learn to CARE again, at least this one last time. You must
get aggressive because distraction and setback are forever a
part of your human destiny. Keep moving, make this come back
a reality, make yourself better again, learn what you need to
learn and do what you need to do to fix your problem. Then
make more comebacks, month after month and year after year!
Get better at this, and you will get better at everything.
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APPENDIX I:
SOME STUFF I LEARNED
WARNING:
This part of the book is one big block of text. LOL.
Here I will go into the specifics and details I have experience
with regarding injuries and safe training. Keep in mind, I am
only one person. I can talk to you about ankle injuries, but I
cannot talk to you about hip injuries (because I’ve never had
a hip injury). This is not a comprehensive analysis of every
condition you may experience because I cannot share what I
do not know, nor will I share things I feel disqualified to share.
(sorry people with hip injuries, nothing here about hips; my
hips are super healthy perhaps from my flexibility).
Every injury, ache, and pain I’ve ever had was something I could
Google to give me helpful information. Barring out the first page
of search results which are a bunch of “ice this” and “compress
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65
this” things from WebMD website clones, if you dig deeper you’ll
find value in message forums and videos. Get good at varying
your search terms. One hour of googling an injury is not enough,
it can take as many as 10 hours of searching (and researching)
to accumulate an actionable knowledge foundation.
The best information is not always in plain sight. It wasn’t
for me. The best information you will find about lower back
injuries and their relationship to training will be in a book or in
a seminar from someone that wrote that book. Should I make
a book or seminar recommendation? Perhaps search for those
yourself! Get good at searching for stuff!
Now, the lower back. I’ve never injured my lower back. I’ve
tweaked it doing some freak things or doing too many things,
but tweaks pass within days. A tweak is not an injury. Don’t be
fooled though, a tweak can mean 4 days of being couch-ridden.
I once tried an acrobatic combo that wrenched my lower back
so bad I was couch-ridden for 4 days. On day 5, I went outside
and threw down mad tricks again. That has been the crazy
thing about back tweaks for me, they’re so severe when they
manifest but can disappear instantly after an arbitrary amount
of time. I don’t qualify tweaks as real injuries. I’ve never actually
injured my lower back. So is my lower back “injury proof” or am
I doing something correctly?
I think the reason I’ve never injured my lower back is that I have
a few key features stacked in my favor. I have insane mobility in
the right places that allows me to move in and out of positions
with a greater margin of safety. I have almost 20 years of beltless
lifting under my belt (nice pun, eh?), which strengthened my
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core in ways belted lifting does not. (I did not use lifting belts
until 2018 when I got into Strongman training.) And I have
an accidental preference for exercises that are healthy for the
lower back.
What are exercises that are healthy for the lower back? How
about the reverse hyperextension. I’ve never read a negative
opinion of the reverse hyperextension exercise, yet I never
trained it regularly. Here is an exercise that is like a head of
broccoli: few people have negative opinions about broccoli. It’s
generally agreed upon that broccoli is a super food we should
all eat. The same goes for the reverse hyperextension, we
should all eat it, it’s a delicious exercise if prepared correctly.
The thing is, I spent half my life doing an exercise that was
a unilateral, unloaded version of the reverse hyperextension:
the rear leg lift stretch. I just did the math, I’ve probably done
more than 50,000 reps of that exercise for each leg in my
lifetime. I use rear leg lift stretches for flexibility, but the motion
is the same, and the stimulation on the lower back is definitely
present and similar to the reverse hyperextension. WOW! I’ve
been doing “reverse hypers” pretty much my entire training
lifetime. I think there may be something to them! Because I
love the results I’ve gotten from its cousin exercise the rear leg
lift. I think the results would be better if I do both!
I just got up from writing this paragraph and walked into the
kitchen. There was a paper towel I left on the ground to soak
up the coffee spill I left earlier this morning. By habit, I squatted
down with good’ ish squat form to protect my spine, instead
of bending over in a way that exposed my spine to tension.
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Why? I can remember when I was a teenager, a trainer at my
gym told me to stop picking things up by rounding my back.
He said big, strong guys usually don’t hurt themselves lifting
heavy weights, because they do it well. They hurt themselves
mindlessly bending over and rounding their back to pick up a
sheet of paper off the floor. That stuck with me, I don’t want to
hurt myself picking up spills and sheets of paper.
Another thing that has protected my lower back is my exposure
to a theory I read on a website about the alternating mobility/
stability of joints from the bottom of the body to the top. The
theory states that you want:
ANKLE MOBILITY
KNEE STABILITY
HIP MOBILITY
LOWER BACK STABILITY
UPPER BACK MOBILITY
NECK STABILITY
It’s been a beautifully effective theory for me in practice. If
your ankles are stuck or trapped, the “mobility” needed in
that joint for a movement will ask for fulfillment from a nearby
joint. Nothing is below the ankle, so if your ankle can’t express
needed mobility in a movement, your knee will answer. You
don’t want the knee to answer the call for mobility, you’ll tear
a ligament in your knee. You want stable knees, not loose,
mobile knees. Let’s go back to the lower back. If your hips or
upper back are lacking mobility, and mobility is called upon to
be expressed, your lower back will be asked to fulfill that need.
You don’t want your lower back to do this, you’ll hurt your
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lower back. This is why you want to train the mobility of the
joints that need mobility so that the joints needed for stability
can do their job!
With my background in training martial arts and stretching,
I have very high levels of mobility in the joints that need
them. In fact, I’ve boasted that my high level of mobility in
my upper back (thoracic spine) has been the primary factor
allowing me to do some really stupid feats of strength and
flexibility that nobody else has dared to try. The barbell chair
splits stunt I do with weight overhead? You think that’s just
groin flexibility? It’s also a ton of upper back flexibility. I use the
words mobility and flexibility interchangeably because I don’t
care, I’m beyond that elitism. I wrote a book on flexibility too,
www.legendaryflexibility.com
Let’s keep going with this lower back thing. Lifting belts. Wow.
If ever there was a topic where the training world’s voices and
opinions will confuse you, this is the one. Here’s some stuff I
learned: a lifting belt takes time to learn to use. You can’t just
toss one on and lift more weight. It took me almost 6 months
to really maximize the use of a lifting belt in the deadlift. That
time was also spent figuring out which belt worked for which lift.
My expensive Inzer lifting belt, I learned, wasn’t the best belt
for every lift. I use different lifting belts for different lifts! Some
people only throw on lifting belts on their top sets, I personally
think this is a poor practice because you lift differently in a belt
than you do without one, and you need to warm up your belted
technique. If I’m lifting with a lifting belt, I’m putting it on on my
first weight jump. So I might warm up with squats with 1 plate
on each side of the bar without a belt, then when I add another
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plate on each side, I’m putting on the belt too. I don’t wear a
belt to protect my lower back, I wear one to lift more weight
and take pressure off my knees when I squat. Oh yeah, that was
one of the coolest, luckiest things I discovered: when I started
wearing a lifting belt when I squatted heavy weights, my patellar
tendinosis began disappearing. Oh, it wasn’t the only thing I
changed, I also stopped wearing Olympic lifting shoes and
went back to flat soled shoes, widened my stance, and stopped
trying to go super ass to grass in depth. With all these changes,
how can I possibly attribute the lifting belt to relieving my knee
condition? Because I can keep all these other changes, and then
if I take the belt on and off alternating between sets with the
same weight I’ll notice my knees being aggravated, and then not
being aggravated. It’s a direct correlation. A lifting belt does so
much more than just protect your back (if it even does?) or help
you lift more weight. It changes the lift entirely. So should you
lift with a belt or not? I do both, but I don’t switch in and out
of belt use on any particular exercise for any single workout. If
I’m squatting today, I’m doing it 100% beltless or 100% belted.
I plan some deadlift sessions for beltless work, other days, I’m
belted the entire time.
I spent almost 20 years of my life not lifting with a belt. The
reason I resisted the belt initially was because I was convinced
it would make my core weaker. It won’t make it weaker, but it
might not make it as strong as it could be if you sometimes
trained without one. Later, as I grew up, the reason I still didn’t
wear a belt was that every time I put one on, it would mess up
my lift. I didn’t know you had to practice and lift differently
in a belt! Finally, the reason I started wearing a belt was that
strongman exercises like heavy yoke walks and heavy farmers
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scared the piss out of me, and I began wearing a belt to add
support. There is nothing natural about carrying 800 lbs on
your back across a gym for time. NOTHING NATURAL AT ALL!
So I tossed on a belt, took some advice on how to correctly
breathe and brace while wearing one, and never looked back.
Conclusion: I wear a belt sometimes.
Belts aren’t the only thing to consider with equipment; we
also have to consider footwear, straps, wraps, etc. Sorry, we’re
talking about lifting gear here, and it’s becoming a one-sided
discussion. Hey, gymnasts/tricksters/free-athletes-whateverthe-yeah: we’ll talk about the pros and cons of plyo floor
training in a sec hang in there. Maybe the virtues of barefoot
training, perhaps? Seriously though, we gotta talk about
weight training more. Because it’s very important. It’s super
therapeutic and helps bulletproof your body if done correctly.
If done incorrectly, you could hurt yourself. Be sure you’re
lifting things with good form that protects your body and
helps build muscle and strength.
A deadlift is a good lift for almost everyone if done well. Learn
to do it well. It will add slabs of useful, beautiful muscle to
your backside and carryover to most forms of athletics up to
a certain point.
My first visit ever to a chiropractor was to accompany my wife
Sam for her appointment when she had a neck problem. The
Chiro showed an interest in me and asked if I’ve ever had an
adjustment. I told him that I hadn’t. He was delighted, “Ok,
jump up on this table I’ll give you one for free. Complimentary
since it’s your first.” COOL! Now, this particular Chiro was
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an ex-wrestler who was jacked. I’m biased towards jacked
chiropractors, massage therapist, bodywork specialists, etc. I
feel like they can relate better to what I am. The Chiro had me
remove my shirt to work better. After he moved me through
some positions, he stopped and said: “wait here.” He then
brought in the techs that worked in the clinic, “Look at his
back. See that armor he’s built around his spine? This is the
healthiest back that’s ever walked into this clinic.” Then he
told me that I wouldn’t be seeing him again because I wouldn’t
need him. Cool story, bro. But really, my back is healthy and
has always been very healthy despite doing really dangerous
lifts and stunts. I attribute it in part to deadlifting beltless
for half of my life with good form. If you don’t deadlift, you
probably should, it’s a bulletproofing exercise. Just don’t hurt
yourself doing it. The first half of this book will give you some
head sense for knowing your limits and having some ground
rules, so you don’t hurt yourself doing an exercise as safe as
the deadlift. Seriously, it’s a very safe, static lift. You shouldn’t
hurt yourself doing it.
I think a lot of lower back problems from doing safe static lifts
like the deadlift can come from pre-fatigue. If your butt is really
sore, your lower back is in greater danger. Your butt protects
your lower back in many movements, so if it’s having difficulties
activating, your lower back will be under more tension. If I
recollect correctly, just about every time I have tweaked my
back, it happened during times I decided to try awkward tricks
when my butt was sore and fatigued from lifting a day or two
prior. If you’re gonna do anything that involves your lower
back, make sure your glutes are on board and aren’t toast from
something you did the other day.
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Pre-fatigue can result in dangerous compensating movement
patterns, but it’s not the only thing that leads to this. A more
severe example is an actual acute injury. When you’re walking
with a limp, your entire body is moving differently (and less
efficiently) to compensate. That compensation puts other
things in danger. Even when we’re seemingly healthy, we may
have unhealthy movement patterns that lead to slow growing
problems. Some of these creepers can be very hard to get rid of
when you recognize their presence. Patellar tendinosis was one
of those things for me. It was my curse for 15 years of my life.
The thing that never went away. Up until a year ago, I thought
it was referred trigger points from the rectus femoris and lower
leg muscles. When doing therapy on those areas to relieve
pressure on the tendon didn’t work, perhaps rest would?! Rest
did not work. No amount of rest, even a substantial 6 months
worth, corrected this issue for me. The problem was seemingly
immune to deep tissue work and rest. Even warmup sets would
aggravate the tendon! Exercises to help with blood flow and
health did nothing. I found no relief. Except I have and did.
How? What did I do to get rid of this pain and begin squatting
heavy weights and doing flips again without thinking about the
knee pain every rep, every day? A lot of things.
My turning point with this condition came when I gave my
acrobatic tricks a long break while altogether ditching my
old squat form. I used to squat low bar, with a shoulder width
stance, beltless, with Olympic lifting shoes, and go beyond
parallel to get a good rebound out of the bottom of the
lift. I did a similar form with the front squat. Squats always
destroyed my knees because of these things. I changed most
of those things, and my knees began healing. I widened my
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stance substantially, I started using a belt, I switched to flat
soled shoes, and I stopped at parallel. What did all of these
things do? The new stance allowed me to recruit more muscles
to take the stress off of my knees. Stopping at parallel still
helped me train the muscles and movement but didn’t put me
in a position that would risk knee aggravation. The belt took a
tremendous amount of pressure off my knees by changing my
hip position in the lift. The Olympic lifting shoes I used to wear,
with a raised heel, was throwing stress right into my knees in a
way my levers did not appreciate. With all of these changes, I
could squat pain-free again! And I did! I was beginning to get
stronger again, and the stronger I got on the squat with my
revamped form, the better my knees felt on things not related
to the squat! The very thing that used to exasperate my knee
condition became the thing to rehabilitate it!
I believe that removing the elements that were aggravating
my knee while adding elements that could strengthen the
muscles around my knee turned the situation around. My
Vastus Medialis muscle wasn’t getting enough training stimulus
in the things I did until I fixed my squat form. The squat form
change not only provided relief but allowed me to target that
weak muscle group that was not strong enough to support my
knees in other movements like flips, jumps, and lunges. This
weakness put loads on my knees that they were never meant
to be responsible for.
Was my old squat form wrong? No, because I see a lot of strong
people squat the way I use to. It wasn’t the best form for my
body type or goals. Form is personal. Technique is personal.
We want to find what works best for us. I settled, for almost my
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entire life, on a squat form I thought looked impressive with its
depth and aesthetic (yes, lifting weights is an aesthetic thing!)
but that form was not good for me. I switched to another form
that was still correct but completely different. You have to ditch
the idea that one technique, one form is right for everybody.
Do what works for you.
There are challenges in doing what works best for you, though! I
was reluctant to switch from my old squat form to my new squat
form because I thought my old squat form was more “hardcore”
and looked better. Unfortunately, it was destroying my body. I
just kept doing it the old way because I thought people would
judge me for the form change. I WAS WORRIED ABOUT WHAT
OTHER PEOPLE WOULD THINK! It’s also one of the reasons
I avoided using a belt for so long: I had always received a lot
of praise for being a beltless lifter. But if wearing a lifting belt
when I squat is going allow me to train pain-free, then it’s just
the way things are going to go. I’ll just have to trade getting
compliments for being strong and beltless for compliments for
just being plain strong. I think I’m still ok with that.
When you make huge changes, though, the benefit may not
be immediate. You have to work on them. When I changed my
squat form, it was a progression. One thing at a time. I just
noticed sometimes my knees felt better and I’d continue doing
what was giving them relief. I had suspicions about why I was
hurting, and I’d try things. Some things took weeks to work
before I knew I was on the right path. There are a lot of things
in the realm of injury management that take weeks to work.
Deep tissue massage is one of those things.
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The benefits of massage work don’t announce themselves
immediately. From my experience, it takes weeks for the benefits
of consistent and good massage work to become apparent.
Consistency, for me, is 30 minutes total per week for six weeks
for any one problem. When I go to get bodywork done, on
say, my forearms, to relieve bicep tendonitis and elbow pain,
the specialist may work 30 minutes on each arm. It feels pretty
good for maybe a day, and then the benefit seems to wear off.
However, for some reason, after about 4 days, it starts to get
better again. I like to think I have the right idea about it, that the
benefit of bodywork has a similar timeline to training adaptations.
After a workout, your body systems are ramped up, and you
feel happier and better. Then you may be sore for the next few
days. After your body repairs and recuperates, you come back
stronger. Recognizing real progression can take months. With
bodywork, you feel happier and better afterward, then you may
be sore for the next few days. Your body needs to repair and
recuperate after the therapy and will be healthier when it’s done.
Like training, though, you need to be consistent with this type of
work and recognizing real benefit can take months.
Here’s what I recommend for you without breaking the bank:
if you have an injury or chronic pain, go see a bodywork
specialist. Have him work on you. Ask him questions so you can
work on yourself at home. Schedule a follow up in three weeks.
Work on yourself during the two weeks in between. After you
see him the second time, continue working on yourself with
new feedback. This is a good recipe for maximizing this form
of recovery. Sure, seeing a specialist every week is good, but
it’s expensive, and the best specialist may not be a convenient
visit. My specialist at the time of writing this is almost an hour
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drive from where I live, I see him every three weeks, and I ask a
lot of questions. I’ve learned a lot from him.
Getting over injury costs time and money. Spending time and
money sends an important message to your unconscious
brain: THIS IS PRIORITY. A lot of people who don’t get better
don’t do things that send these messages of priority to their
unconscious brain. If you have a reason you need to heal, a
deadline, a competition, if you have money on the line, if you
have a contract you can’t get out of, if others depend on you, if
you have a lot of things that push you to prioritize a comeback,
then you will do well. Put those things in place to push you,
whatever they could be. Perhaps think of it as a fight.
A fighter has all of these things pushing him to recover for the
next fight. They signed a contract for a series of fights, which
are scheduled at known times. A lot of people have money
riding on their success, including the fighter. The fighter, nor
the fighter’s family want to see them beat to a pulp. They may
be fresh off their last fight and wrecked. What do you think
they’re going to do? Let the body heal itself? Of course not,
they’re going to do everything they can, and get everyone they
know, to assist in recovering for the next thing. THE NEXT
THING. That’s why you need to WORK on fixing your injuries.
WHAT IS YOUR NEXT THING?
A lot of people can’t bring themselves to do this. One big
reason a lot of people give up after a bad injury is the prospect
they’ll never recover 100% or be as strong as they used to be.
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For people sitting with these thoughts. I’ve created a chart to
illustrate one of my theories.
­­­In this example, notice nothing is as good as an ammonia
inhalant. That’s important. Aside from accepting that, this is
how I like to think of “retraining” prospects after a bad injury: If
you stop training when you formerly had a high-performance
knee, then it will be fragile, and you will, perhaps, suffer from
arthritis-like symptoms and stuff from inactivity; However, if
you make a comeback, you could be indiscernibly as strong
as you were. With many previous injuries, the tissue is never
the same, that’s true, but if you train it back up, it could be
“good enough” to do what you want, or at least just as good as
before. Lesson: don’t stop training! Don’t stop moving!
The point that I’m trying to illustrate is that for bad injuries,
you may never recover completely, but you can recover not
only good enough to perform the way you want but also to
some of the highest levels of performance if you demanded
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it. Indeed, you can probably recover to the point that you
wouldn’t be able to tell that you were ever injured in the first
place (if you continue training it for functionality). If you ever
stop training for functionality, your past injuries will haunt
you with weakness and/or chronic pain: your default has been
lowered. This is why older people who used to train a lot, or
had some injuries in the past, who start to slow down, complain
about the stupid training things they did in their youth. They
had old injuries, their defaults were lowered, and now that
they’re slowing down, they’re haunted by arthritis and chronic
pain in those old injuries.
We’re talking about bad injuries. The worst injury I’ve had was
a grade II ankle sprain. How did it happen? I did a cheat 900
double kick to aerial combo, and to help transition to the aerial
I pointed my foot forward on the landing of the kick instead
of out (out is the correct placement) and my foot exploded
on landing that kick. LOL! Can you dig the details? Cool. Ok,
but really, my peroneal muscles were exhausted after almost 3
hours of training my acrobatics. That’s too long. Since then, I
always arbitrarily cap my acrobatic practice time to 90 minutes,
including warmup. This is my personal rule to protect myself.
So my ankle gave out because my lower leg muscles were too
exhausted to brace for landing. However, I was training on a
plyo floor. Here are some details you want to keep in mind
if you ever have the mind to go to a gymnastics gym to do
anything ever: most of these gyms have a plyo floor. Plyo floor
is made up of hard springs with layers of plywood and carpet
on top. It’s not a trampoline, but it gives a little bounce, which
helps a lot with rebounding movements and impact absorption.
I personally believe training on this floor is excellent as long
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as you don’t train too long. That’s the problem though, plyo
flooring tempts you to continue training into the highest states
of fatigue, which is dangerous. The plyo flooring is soft enough
to allow ligaments, toes, fingers, and stuff, to go too far in the
wrong direction upon the immediate impact, but then you
reach a hard bottom. In other words: plyo floor can be a trap,
it lets you in but won’t let you out. So you sprain an ankle, tear
an ACL, or break a digit.
With all of this said, my ankle has never been the same. The
first two years were the worst. My left ankle was chronically
more swollen than my right. I continued to use it, and after a
few more years, my left ankle returned to the same size as the
other one. My left is more fragile, though. It doesn’t have the
bandwidth for error it had before the accident. That’s ok, I just
don’t make mistakes anymore! My ankle is just fine if I’m on my
game. Let’s talk about ankle health.
If you do barbell sports, you’ll likely never have to worry about
ankle health or conditioning. It’s a non-issue. If you like jumping,
or both jumping and bodybuilding, then you must learn things
about ankle health. Ankles are very strong but very susceptible
to injury. Here’s a bunch of knowledge bombs: jog barefoot
on grass sometimes, stretch your toes by gripping them and
manually moving them around, walk around while clawing the
ground with them, lift heavy barefoot occasionally, grab your
ankles and force them into rotations, try those rotations while
your ankles are wrapped in Voodoo floss, spell the alphabet
with your ankles, do those boring tibialis dorsiflexion exercises,
stretch your ankles, stand on your tippy toes (literally, on the
tips of your toes) and hold it, jump rope, walk on the tops of
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your toes like ballerinas, watch ballet videos on YouTube, do
ankle eversions and aversions, throw a band around the base
of a power rack and then around your midfoot and jerk your
ankle around, perhaps do some heavy calf raise exercises too?
Training the ankles is excruciatingly boring, but if you depend
upon them, you gotta find a way to train them in a palatable
and effective way. Injuring an ankle sucks. Thankfully, since
ankles are at the bottom of your body, it’s pretty easy to find
exercises to do while your ankle is injured. You have everything
on top of the ankles to play with. When I was dealing with my
ankle sprain, I wasn’t able to do my acrobatic skills for months,
but I could deadlift heavy weight within a week of the injury!
While I’m talking about ankles, I gotta say that one issue with
recovering an ankle injury is the difficulty of compression and
elevation. I personally like compressing and elevating injuries,
and since the ankle is at the bottom, I gotta wrap that sucker
and prop it up? Good grief. It’s inconvenient. Still, do it when
you can. If you want to take compression recovery modalities
to the next level, try pairing voodoo flossing an injured joint
with high range of motions movements. Ex: ankle needs rehab.
I’ll wrap it in voodoo floss for a high level of compression, grab
that sucker, and move it around through a high level of amplitude
with my hands for 30-60 seconds. When I unwrap it, my ankle
feels better immediately. I’ll repeat this type of thing up to
3 times. Recently I’ve done it with an elbow injury incurred
through arm wrestling with decent results. Compression rocks.
Compression is therapeutic, recuperative, and it helps you lift
more weight. I love using compression gear when I lift. I love
knee sleeves, knee wraps, elbow sleeves, etc. I can lift more, and
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I recover better. Compression gear can also be stylish. For me,
it’s win-win-win when using compression gear! Compression
gear also helps if I have pre-existing pain. Try it. If you have
some sort of knee or elbow pain, try knee or elbow sleeves. To
get to an expert level, add a little liniment to the joint before
putting the sleeves/wraps on, the increase in blood flow and
warmth will provide relief, and possibly promote healing.
Really, training can be a totally unnatural thing. Barbells,
double backflips, plyo floors, etc. are all very unnatural things.
The idea that you can enter a world of unnatural stressors
and come out unscathed without some unnatural means of
protecting yourself is absurd. Nothing is natural. Microwaves,
shoes, air conditioning, steel formed into weird shapes to
exercise with in weird ways, none of this is “natural.” This is why
I advocate for the use of any type of equipment you can use to
protect yourself. If you have joint issues, you really should wear
sleeves or wraps or something. If you don’t, you should still
probably consider the use of these things to keep what you
got as long as you can. I’ve seen older people squatting with
elbow sleeves on. “Wait, why are you wearing elbow sleeves?
Do you even need them for squatting?” and their answer “I
only have so much mileage left, even in joints that I’m not using
for this exercise, it feels better, what’s the drawback?” Really,
what’s the drawback? The body isn’t some infinite wellspring
of recovery. Our joints only have so much mileage. Or are you
one of those fellows that’s concerned what others will think if
you’re wrapped, strapped, and belted to the gills? I’ll take my
wraps, straps, and belts if I can get another 10 years of lifting
in me using them, and an extra 100 lbs on my lifts… Thank
you very much!
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I’m not going to post a video of me squatting with a description:
“660 lb PR on squats in knee wraps and with a belt and wrist
wraps.” Screw that. I’m going to announce if I default to an
unequipped state instead: “500 lb squats beltless, no sleeves,
raw AF.” There. If you think I’m wrong, then try using more
equipment when you lift and see how you feel. You’ll likely be
stronger and be having more fun! If my ankle hurts, I’m wearing
an ankle brace to protect myself. If anything hurts, I’m going to
protect it. If nothing hurts, I’m still going to protect it! The point
is to progress and not hurt yourself. Going through the ins and
outs of how you do that is a real art; one you learn for yourself.
I hinted at barefoot training a few times here. I’m sorry, I
cannot and will not write you a thesis on why it’s the best thing
in the universe, because I don’t believe it is. However, I think
it’s played a significant role in keeping me injury free. You see,
I’ve spent half of my life doing challenging skills (flips, twists,
kicks) barefoot. Every practice session for these skills involved
me warming up my toes, feet, and ankles with deliberate
movements. If you compare my feet with all the other members
of my family, they’re remarkably different and more healthy. I
have very muscular, proportional, robust feet. I’ll never have to
see a podiatrist in my life because I’ve trained barefoot a lot in
my life. Why don’t I train barefoot all the time? Because shoes
look cool sometimes, and I enjoy wearing them and using them
for many things. It’s not all or nothing here! Some barefoot
training will help you and benefit you; you don’t have to be
a cultish convert to reap the benefits of the “foot-building”
aspect of barefoot training! What does this have to do with
injury prevention? The feet are at the bottom. Everything
stands on top of them. If you have good control of your feet,
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that control will run up the entire chain and allow you to evade
danger more readily. Good feet protect you. Good feet are,
in part, developed through training barefoot and deliberately
training your feet.
Shoulders! Wow. I have not said a word about them yet! The
thing is I have big, muscular, strong shoulders and have never
had a shoulder injury… except for the time that I crashed a wall
flip on my neck and shoulder. OUCH! Other than that trauma,
my shoulders have been healthy. Why? For one, a strong and
developed back protects your shoulders. Bro science? Actually,
it’s just I’m too lazy to science you. Just do some heavy rows
and build your back muscles for crying out loud. Seated rows,
dumbbell rows, bent over rows, do them all. I’ve had a boner
for deadlifts since I was 17, and it resulted in my back becoming
my most developed muscle group.
Aside from that, I didn’t like bench pressing until my late
twenties. Bad benching, or too much benching, will likely wreck
your shoulders. I’ve done neither. My bench form has been fine,
and I do it sometimes. My best bench as of writing this is 420
lbs (190 kgs). The bench press has never been a big priority for
me. It has been the biggest let down in terms of building chest
muscle (it hasn’t built any chest muscle for me, I’ve needed
entirely different exercises to do that), and it hasn’t had any
carryover to my athletics. I enjoy benching, though. That’s why
I do it. I’ve probably spent less time benching compared to the
next guy, but have a higher bench than most people. Why? One
reason is that I love overhead barbell pressing, and that has
carried over to my bench press. The overhead press was the lift
that essentially built my shoulders, yet many people don’t do it
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because they think it’s an unhealthy lift for the shoulder joint.
Those people probably don’t do enough rows! They probably
don’t practice mobility exercises for the upper body either:
swings, stretches, rotations, etc. I stretch my shoulders a lot!
I always have. This is the anecdotal advice I can give regarding
any pursuit of building shoulders and preventing problems:
stretch them a lot, strengthen and build slabs of back muscles,
and don’t do too much of any particular pressing movement
(vary it up). Hopefully, there is some truth in there.
That’s plenty about the mechanisms of sports injuries. What
about supplements and dietary choices that may help with
recovery from injury? I’ve done enough google searching and
trial to tell you that it’s not all that exciting. Just eat an antiinflammatory diet and supplement with anti-inflammatory
substances like fish oil, turmeric powder, and greens powders.
Don’t expect a miracle: you’re not going to start drinking onion
juice or some other nonsense and recover in 3 days.
In contrast to this, something I do find exciting is the prospect
of exploring the supplements and dietary choices that prevent
injury from happening! Don’t you think it would be better to
take something or eat something that keeps you from getting
injured in the first place? Let’s talk about caffeine.
Caffeine improves reaction time, speed, stamina, mood, and
focus. Improving these things enhances performance. Is that
enhancement risky? You could make the analogy that training
while enhanced by caffeine is a similar risk to overclocking a
computer’s CPU (increases performance but also increases
the risk of crashing via overheating). I believe it’s incorrect. I
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think caffeine can reduce your risk of injury because of the
enhancement it provides. How? It’s how you train under the
influence of caffeine that shifts the risk ratio in your favor.
The best way to train on stimulants like caffeine for safety
(and probably progress) is not to give in to the temptation to
take advantage of their powers by training longer. It’s not the
stimulants that increase your risk of accident, it’s training too
long. Even if you think you’re being wasteful of the stimulant’s
powers, just cap your training time. Stopping short when
you’re geeked up on a stimulant cocktail is one of the hardest
things to discipline yourself to do. Maybe, just maybe, you
really should just stop.
It makes it easier to stop short on stimulants if you use a little
less. 100 mg vs. 200 mg of caffeine, for example. Half a scoop of
pre-workout vs. a full scoop. Consider mixed training sessions
if it’s difficult to practice restraint when you’re stimulated.
For example, combine upper body pressing, hand balancing,
stamina work, flexibility training (extreme splits!), etc. all into
one workout. Not all forms of training carry the same risk of
injury. When stimulated, you can train a higher volume of the
safe, boring things that could inevitably fortify your body
against future injury. Shin exercises anyone?
This discussion assumes you have a problem with having too
much energy in the first place! That’s a good problem to have,
and it’s possibly unrelatable to the majority of people older than
26 years. I’m essentially telling you not to spend all the money
you make if you have a windfall! High energy states are often like
jackpots and windfalls: you’re lucky when you get them.
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A more common problem is training when you’re tired and
uncoordinated, disconnected, and unmotivated. In these
situations, your body has thrown on the brakes. You’re unlikely
to hurt yourself because you can’t do anything hard enough
actually to cause damage. Unless it’s something like parkour
where you trip and fall or miss a ledge when you jump! There
are many forms of training, speaking in absolutes here is
difficult please cut me some slack!
The real trick isn’t to learn to train when you feel like crap,
it’s not to feel like crap in the first place! Prevention is key.
Sleep well, reduce stress, diagnose your eating weaknesses,
and organize your training better. Stimulants are a temporary
solution to the problem of feeling crappy, but they can worsen
the condition in the long run. “Borrowed energy” is a term I’ve
heard, it’s about 50% true. I know guys who intake over a gram
of caffeine a day, and they have less energy than some of my
caffeine free friends. (yes, caffeine-free humans do exist, and
they’re weird). Some of my caffeine free friends would make
better progress if they used caffeine strategically one day a
week or a few days a month. Those could potentially be the
days they could use it to protect themselves from injury by
heightening their senses. There is a lot of giving and taking
here on this particular subject because it’s complicated. Yes,
ultimately, I’m advocating for strategic caffeine use to prevent
accidents when training to those who tolerate the substance
well. There are a lot of other substances to consider in this
discussion;. However, consideration of the nuances of caffeine
use would adequately prepare you for decisions regarding the
others because they’re governed by the same logic.
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Getting good at overcoming injuries is an art. On the one hand,
you have good mindset practices. On the other hand, you have
intelligent, workable concrete practices. Don’t forget, none of
this works if you don’t CARE.
Hopefully, there is something in this part of the book that has
excited you. This isn’t everything I can say, because there are
things I can say that I’m not thinking to say. For what it is worth,
I think deep down, you have some ideas on the right thing to
do regarding any injury you may have. Good luck. Don’t forget:
Google Search is your friend. Check out the next section with
interviews from all-star athletes from wildly different fields!
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APPENDIX II:
INTERVIEWS
I talked to the elite from a variety of training backgrounds
about injuries and transcribed those conversations into
text. I kept many of the “uh” “like” “so” “you know” types
of verbal ticks in the text for fun. Read fast and hear their
voices in your head! These are all conversational! And look
for similarities in what they shared, it’s intriguing! Enjoy.
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DEVON LARRATT
PROFESSIONAL ARM WRESTLER
Devon Larratt on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBcMvaSRmSh3362bzvOBerw
Devon Larratt on Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/devlarratt/
Background: Devon and I became fast friends after our first
time working together in January 2019. This conversation we had
was after breakfast at my house. Sam, my wife, as a practicing
Physician Assistant in Psychiatry at the time, couldn’t help but
jump into the conversation. Things got weird, but this conversation
offers something unique from an injury discussion perspective.
Devon: The body’s lazy. And the best way to make it heal is
really with constant reminders because you get an injury and
right away, stuff happens, you send inflammation to the area
and… the thing is, we all kind of understand that scarring is
very far from perfect. Scarring is from what we understand, very
random. And really, the main things that I’ve had to heal that
like required any amount of work was connective structures…
musculature heals without any real change to what most athletes
do all the time. You might have to go a bit easier for a while, but
the muscles heal… it’s like being sore –
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Jujimufu: Like a ligament tear? Yeah?
Devon: Yeah that’s more serious. Tendonitis is the beginning of
all this and then you have the tears, and I feel like it’s really about
understanding the threshold of pain that is good versus bad,
and continuing to work through that progressively. So like, you
know, you hurt your elbow when you’re arm wrestling. Like every
single armwrestler in the world can tell you the story. And what
so many people do, and what I did initially, that’s wrong, is leave
it alone. And I think that this is not optimal. I really think that
your body takes an injury, throws a bunch of stuff at it to glue it
down and then you go back to living your life.
Jujimufu: Yeah.
Devon: But if you really want it to be good, you have to seek out
the pain in your body. And your body’s pretty good at letting
you know when you’re doing too much. Like if I find that pain
and if I really stimulate it, it’s going to get sharp. And that’s
clearly too much Sam: No.
Jujimufu: Do you think most people know the difference?
Sam: No.
Jujimufu: Because I mean, it’s intuitive to me to know like, okay,
this is like uncomfortable pain.
Sam: No.
Jujimufu: Like this is injury and this is…
Devon: Well, I dunno. I mean I hear Sam saying, no.
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Sam: No they do not know.
Jujimufu: Sam, are you…? Sam, are you part of this interview?
Come in here.
Sam: No, I’m telling you as a health care provider.
Devon: People don’t know?
Sam: No! They say my life is horrible. I want to kill myself or I
can’t do anything because I’m in pain. Everybody is in pain.
Devon: Everybody’s in pain. Yeah.
Sam: It’s just a matter of mindset cause If you look at it culturally,
it’s different, right? But then it’s like, “Oh, I need this medicated.”
“Oh, I can’t do this,” and it just presents itself as an excuse, but
people don’t know what’s an acceptable range of pain and when
it’s actually pathologic.
Devon: Right, right, right.
Sam: And then is it just a mental manifestation of their
depression?
Devon: Yeah. Yeah. The scale of pain is very interesting.
Sam: Yes.
Devon: So, it’s true. Some people don’t want any pain in their
life at all.
Sam: Right. And then you have to give them a wake up call,
like, oh, you know, that stress and anxiety and the pain, all that.
I can’t medicate that shit away. Like unless you’re dead. And
when I was talking to people on my unit, uh, no, you probably
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remained suicidal if that’s the case.
Devon: Yeah, yeah. It’s like a part of your balance.
Sam: Right. And so it’s a matter of being able to manage it, and
they aren’t aware of their bodies the way athletes are.
Devon: It’s very interesting to me, this whole subject because
my brother, unfortunately he’s passed away, but my brother was
part of the very small percentage of the population and he was
a body modifier. He was the editor for one of the original body
modification communities in the world. Anyways, so I talked to
him a lot about this kind of subject and what he told me was
pain, reception and interpretation is actually formed In Utero.
So you actually are born with your pain interpretation intact.
Like, so when you were a child, there’s a spectrum and he said, so
much of it has to do with testosterone In Utero. The more test,
for whatever reason, it changes the way your brain works. He
said in some cases it goes so far… And in his community, this is
where a lot of the people sit where they actually had those wires
kind of very different, where pain actually feels good to them.
Like it’s actually the more pain they feel, it’s actually crossed
so that it feels good. So they do all sorts of self mutilation
because to them it’s interpreted as… and, and I feel like there’s
a spectrum there. So I, in my biased opinion, this is unhealthy
and not productive to, you know, getting the goals that you’re
after in life. Like, I don’t think hurting yourself is typically what
most people do to achieve what they’re trying to do.
Sam: I wonder how much of this is learned.
Devon: That’s the thing, right? And he told me that he thought
that it was from In Utero. And the reason he told me this is
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because primarily, um, the distribution of the people that he
worked with, the only people who are really crazy into pain are
men. Like, 0.2% of women are into this. Like if you’re a woman
who’s into pain, you’re a complete outlier, like complete. But
men, it’s actually much more common. So he theorized that it
was testosterone based In Utero. And then on top of that he said
that the populations that he saw it most predominant in were
very high performing men, like CEO’s of companies, doctors,
lawyers, well educated, well performing, high salary. These guys
are very commonly into pain.
Sam: So, do you know what you’re also outlining right now?
Devon: No.
Sam: So then, you have mostly men, mostly high achieving. In
the professions you name. There’s a higher incidence of anti
social personality disorders. Being a psychopath.
Devon: Well this is all together.
Jujimufu: Crazy.
Sam: And often with those people, their brain structure,
especially their executive function is altered. If you look at it on
a functional MRI, they don’t process things the same way. And
so they’re always adrenaline seeking because what we would see
as exciting, they don’t get anything from that. So again, that’s a
different threshold.
Devon: Yeah, exactly.
Devon: I think when you come to the health and wellness
perspective you really have to have that very accurate. So you
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really have to figure out what’s too much, what causes damage
and what stimulates. And I think from an athletic performance
perspective, you got to have that really in tuned. I think that for
me, anything that um, becomes sharp or like, I feel like it’s doing
more damage, um, is for me a deterrent. And when I find the
pain and kind of try and get comfortable with it and continue to
push, you know, what I’m comfortable with… This is the path for
healing for me. And so much of it is movement based, progressive
resistance based, until I get to a point where it’s very hard to find
the pain. Like I can hurt myself anytime I want in any part in my
body if I do something completely ridiculous. But once, I get
to that level, then I’m really not dealing with an injury anymore.
You know, that’s been the course for basically my entire life - get
hurt, and continue to work with the pain until it disappears.
Jujimufu: Yeah. You don’t ever just sit there.
Devon: No. You just continue to find the pain, work with it, work
with it... And it’s all about movement, it’s all about increasing the
circulation to the tissue that’s damaged. The best way to do this
in my mind is through movement.
Jujimufu: Yeah.
Devon: Yeah.
Jujimufu: Yeah.
Devon: Yeah.
Jujimufu: Sounds awesome. I mean blood is the best healing
thing. Right? It’s increasing blood flow. It’s like this cause it’s
transporting nutrients. It’s exporting waste products. Basically,
expediting the process.
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Devon: The plan is already in every single tissue. In your body.
It just needs the resources to execute.
Jujimufu: and movement is the execution,
Devon: movement facilitates nutrition. And removal of, you
know, crud.
Devon: And it lays it down, right? It turns the scar into aligned
tissue, which is better.
Sam: I mean, with some procedures you rely on the scar tissue
for structure. Again, that’s some orthopedic procedures, but
other times you want to break up the scar tissue, and that’s
most cases. But again, people are afraid. They don’t know about
pain tolerance. A lot of people aren’t athletic. And they don’t
know what’s normal and what’s not normal. So they’re just going
to avoid all pain.
Devon: Right. And that’s not good. Well for what we’re trying
to do.
Sam: And it’s hard to educate people on pain. Especially when
there is that mental component there too, where it’s taking away
my quality of life. But again, you have to switch that. Like living
at a 4 out of 10 of pain. You can go get a fucking job. You don’t
have to be on disability.
Devon: No.
Sam: So, I dealt with that a lot on my unit too. “I’m in pain.”
Okay. “And I’m seeking out disability.” Okay. “And Yeah, I’m
suicidal too.” What do you want? “Oh, you know I just can’t
do things.” You’re doing everything here. You’re more functional
than, you know, that 74-year-old person who has dementia.
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MAGNUS MIDTBØ
PROFESSIONAL ROCK CLIMBER
Magnus Midtbo on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_gSotrFVZ_PiAxo3fTQVuQ
Magnus Midtbo on Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/magmidt/
Background: Magnus competed in rock climbing for 20 years
before retiring to focus on his YouTube channel (where he still
focuses on climbing challenges and other athletics!) Magnus seems
always to be ok. He never complains. And he doesn’t age. Has he
ever been injured? Apparently not. I don’t know of any other athlete
with his experience and caliber that can say the same.
Jujimufu: All right, let’s talk.
Magnus: Ah yea yea.
Jujimufu: Alright Magnus, so you’ve been climbing for 20 years.
Super competitive.
Magnus: Super competitive lol.
Jujimufu: You retired a couple of years ago to focus on your
YouTube channel and your businesses and your gyms and
buying a bunch of cows and moving up in northern Norway.
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Magnus: Haha! That’s my future plans. Haha.
Jujimufu: That’s your future plans. Right. But you’ve never hurt
yourself training?
Magnus: No.
Jujimufu: Whhhhhy?!! How is that even possible?
Magnus: Yeah. I don’t know. I don’t really have a good answer. I
guess it’s genetic. Most of it probably. Um, because obviously I’ve
trained really hard all of my life. I also think it’s because I haven’t
taken any longer breaks. Like the people I talk to who have been
injured, they usually injure themselves after a long break.
Jujimufu: Well how long is a long break?
Magnus: Like two, three weeks.
Jujimufu: Two or three weeks?
Magnus: Yeah, without training because they still have a lot of
that power and they pull too hard, and then something happens.
And, I do think I’m good at listening to my body also, because if
I feel that something is hurting a little bit, I stop. Another thing
people say when they get injured, they often say they get this
sign, and then they choose to ignore it and then it happens. It’s
like a little warning. The body sends you a little warning first.
Jujimufu: Those are the things that I’ve found that it took
me having experience to figure out when to listen to them.
I’ve injured myself with those warnings, and now I’ll get some
of the same warnings and be like, ”I know what this actually
means now.” So, it’s interesting you say that because I have a
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feeling a lot of people just don’t have the experience to know
what those warnings mean when they happen. But! YOU know
when to listen. So! When… When you get those warning signs
during the workout, for example, you’re on the wall, climbing and
something just doesn’t feel right, and your gut intuition is telling
you no. What do you do?
Magnus: I just pack my stuff and leave.
Jujimufu: You pack your stuff and leave?
Magnus: Even if I’ve only been at the gym for 30 minutes. I think
that is a problem people have. Like a lot of people will feel guilty.
Like, “Oh I only have 30 minutes. I’m going to continue a little
longer. My body should take this.” But um, I mean as soon as
I feel something I.. I don’t continue. It’s also about not feeling
100%. I sometimes push it, I feel tired and everything, but if I
feel pain at a certain place, like especially the fingers or elbows, I
stop. Cause that would be the worst injury for me.
Jujimufu: A finger or elbow injury?
Magnus: Yeah, or shoulder.
Jujimufu: I don’t even know what a finger injury would feel like
coming on.
Magnus: Or I can rip a pulley or something and that’s.. ahhh!
Jujimufu: Hahaha.
Magnus: Yeah. That hurts. You can’t! Then you’re out of the
game.
Jujimufu: Oh my gosh. Yeah.
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Magnus: There are a lot of injuries in climbing not related to
falling and stuff, but just like too much strain on the… especially
the fingers and elbows and stuff. I mean, it’s weird, you’d think
that I’d be injured by now, but I’m not. But now I’m aging, I’m
kind of old now, so I guess at some point I will be injured. But,
uh, so far so good!
Jujimufu: Wow. That’s incredible. Uh, when you get those, uh,
warning signs and you pack your bag and leave. What’s your
plan the next day?
Magnus: The next day I will just rest. I mean, ideally, I would just
stretch or do something else, like go for a run or something.
And I would probably do that now, but back in the days when I
was specializing, I wouldn’t use any other muscles than I really
needed to. Like if I went on a run and I felt happy the next day,
I would eat more and, uh, and also my leg muscles would feel
tired: I didn’t feel like it helped me in a way. So yeah, usually I
just rest now. Yeah.
Jujimufu: And then maybe when you came back after a day of
rest, you wouldn’t get that warning sign again?
Magnus: Yeah, it would be gone, and I would maybe climb a
little bit easier. But, in the heat of the moment you try a certain
boulder, you’ve closed on it and, and that’s when it’s not easy
to take a break if you feel something. Because you just want to
finish that project, you’ve tried it 10 times, you think you’ve got
it next time, even though it hurts a little bit, you just want to
get it. Like you just want to do it! You know? But, um, yeah. So,
I think that’s the key. And I mean, I’m probably a little bit lucky
the way I’m built and stuff.
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Magnus: I know some people get injured really fast. And it’s also
about how early I started, I’ve been climbing nonstop since I
was 10 years old. I think that was also part of the reason, and
also the fact that like, I’ve done a lot of antagonist training, for
a climber at least. So like pushups and all that stuff. I’m more all
rounded than the normal climber.
Jujimufu: Oh, you balance things out a little bit?
Magnus: I tried to, at least a lot of climbers get that… what’s it
called when the shoulders? *Magnus motions rounded forward
shoulders* Uh, in like that bad posture. Yeah.
Jujimufu: In weightlifting a lot of the guys who just focus on
bench pressing, because it’s the most popular lift in the gym,
won’t work their back muscles because they can’t actually see
their back in the mirror. You can see your chest and your arms
so you’re going to work them and look at yourself in the mirror,
and get a good feeling from it. But then your shoulders round
forward, your rotator cuffs are, are a little bit endangered. You’re
going to possibly blow a pec, who knows. But I’ve always done
a lot of back work cause I guess I fell in love with deadlifting. It’s
the best back exercise from weightlifting in my opinion. It built
me a huge back and it’s protected my shoulders and chest a lot
when I started moving towards doing the beach muscle lifts and
stuff. So yeah, being a well rounded rock climber…
Magnus: I think that helps. Especially elbows and shoulders.
Part of me thinks that like, if I’m lighter, I’m less exposed to
injuries. But at the same time, you would just climb on smaller
more difficult holes. I don’t know.
Jujimufu: You would just be climbing more because you’re lighter
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and then you can just, yeah. You negate that benefit. Yeah.
Magnus: And you won’t eat as much volume. I think it’s a
combination of things and I think, uh, that’s usually what it is.
You know, it’s not always so black and white.
Jujimufu: I think it’s an art, but it sounds like you’ve mastered it.
With your intuition and experience, and you can even chalk up
some of it to luck. It’s very, uh, yeah, what’s the word? It’s uh …
respectable of you to not just be like, “Oh, I’m the best, and I’ve
never hurt myself because I know what I’m doing.” Instead you’re
like, “Yeah, some of it’s just luck,” but damn dude, like not all of it
is luck for 20 years. I think for a competitive rock climber; you’re
doing something right.
Magnus: Yeah. It’s just, I feel like a lot of people don’t have the
answers, so they try to just come up with something that sounds
good. Yeah. I’d rather just like, be honest about it because I don’t
really know what it is, you know? And, uh, yeah. It’s probably a
combination of different things.
Jujimufu: Yeah. That’s great. Hehehehe.
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JOHN WAYNE PARR
PROFESSIONAL MUAY THAI FIGHTER
John Wayne Parr on Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/johnwayneparr
John Wayne Parr on Twitter
https://www.twitter.com/johnwayneparr
Background: I found John because I did a search for the top
Instagram accounts that were following me. I noticed he was at
the top of that list. I checked him out and HOLY CRAP!!! At the
time this book was written, John’s Muay Thai fighting record is 132
fights, with 99 wins. That means he wins 75% of his matches. He’s
been fighting most of his life, and he’s currently 43 years old. And
he still fights! John has a one of a kind experience with injuries.
(Note: This was transcribed over a phone conversation and John’s
Australian accent was difficult for me to suss out his exact wording
in combination with the audio quality. Apologies.)
John: Usually after a fight you just get that body soreness. Your
thighs get kicked in. Um, yeah, your forearms from blocking kicks,
uh, we also get a lot of cuts from fighting with the elbows. In my
career I’ve had 335 stitches in the face from fighting with elbows.
Jujimufu: Wow. Now, uh, those types of cuts and bruises and
stuff, I’d imagine that’s one type of pain and ache and stuff. But
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what happens if you like tear a hamstring or you are getting, you
know, kicked and you break some ribs and stuff? What’s your
approach to recover from things like that?
John: Yeah, so ribs are a tough one cause you can be out for three
months just from the pain. Then having to get the confidence to
slowly wade back into training again. And until you’re like, going
back at it 100%, that fear of getting back into the ring after
having a rib broken, the last thing you want to do is rebreak it
and go through all that pain again. So yeah, not rushing coming
back to training too early. And just being careful about overexerting those first few weeks back.
Jujimufu: Yeah. Yeah. I read uh, I was doing some research on
you online. I read that your worst injury was a, uh, that you got
hit in the eye socket with an elbow and it John: Yeaaaaah. Yeah, it broke in two places.
Jujimufu: And it’s something like that? When you say like a
worst injury, like was that something that held you back for a
long time, or have you had like, any chronic injuries? A knee
thing or an elbow thing that just wouldn’t go away for a long
period of time?
John: In the long term I’ve been very fortunate to be very, very,
very blessed to be injury free the majority of my career. I don’t
have anything that I can really say that holds me back. Every
morning I still wake up, I run 12 km’s in the morning. I train some
more in the afternoon. My knees are good, my hips are good.
Uh, yeah. Everything. Everything’s good. Yeah, it’s crazy. Yeah.
Other people try and keep up with me for a month or so, and
then their bodies will start breaking down. I have been rather
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fortunate. So, yeah. I’ve been fortunate to keep it up for the last
30 years. It’s been crazy.
John: And with the eye socket. It felt like… In the ring. I got
caught against the ropes and he threw an elbow, and I instantly
felt like someone had stuck a hot chisel through my cheek bone.
I took a knee, and the referees started counting, and I looked up
and he said, “I’m not going to bother counting anymore.” I was
done. I went to the changing room. One of my best friends is a
doctor. He gave me some painkillers and they didn’t even touch
the sides. So we went straight to the hospital and then, um, we
checked in and as we were waiting to get called up, I dropped
my keys. I went to pick my keys up and then, um, blood started
coming out of both my nostrils. And as soon as the nurse noticed
that they said, “All right, you’re going straight to the emergency
room.” Then they took an X-ray of my face and found two
broken bones in the eye socket. So um, I ended up staying in
the hospital for four days and I was, uh, on the borderline of
operating or not operating. When you break your eye socket,
sometimes the eye sinks into the back of your head. You have
different perceptions of your vision. So, yes, and borderline. And
then you get to hold one eye, and they show you something red,
and then hold the other eye and it’s a different color red. And
they operate immediately in cases of detachment.
Jujimufu: This is so crazy, man. The other people I’m interviewing
in this book are like you know, static strength athletes. And this
is just like something, yeah. None of the other people can relate
to. This is just completely a different planet you’re coming from.
This is great. Uh,
John: Yeah. So, and we were very lucky to fight. In Muay Thai you
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have eight different weapons. You have your kicks, your knees,
your elbows and punches so if something’s sore, say you have a
sore shin, you just use the other seven weapons until that shin
becomes good and then you start using it again.
Jujimufu: Oh, so you just work around it this way.
John: Cause we’re living from fight the fight. We don’t have an
opportunity to have time off. You always got to maintain your
fitness, you always gotta be strong and if the phone rings, you
gotta be ready to fight. Tomorrow. Cause you’re living off your
fights, it’s the only thing you’re surviving on. It’s mandatory that
you be ready to fight at anytime. Yeah. So many times like uh,
let’s say you get a cut in training five days before your fight. So,
you get it to stop. Then you’ll take the stitches out an hour
before the weigh in so they don’t see the cut, and you try and
pretend that everything’s okay and um, if they hit it and that
reopens the cut, you just ignore it and just keep fighting until
the bell. Cause winning is more important than a little bit of
blood.
Jujimufu: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, just one thing I’m curious about
though. I mean you said that you’re very fortunate in that you’ve
been pretty, uh, like injury free in terms of like hurting yourself
training and stuff. Now the fight stuff is different. You know, you
walk into the ring, get cut up and bruised up. But you know,
I don’t really feel when people tell me that they’re fortunate
about anything, that it’s just luck. You’re doing some stuff, right,
man. Yeah. Like, do you think there’s anything that you’re doing
that has just been like a guardian angel on your shoulder over
the years? That’s just kind of protected you?
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John: I think it’s because I haven’t stopped since I was11 years
old. I’ve pretty much trained almost every day. Uh, I think if I
stopped, then come back, and try, maybe the body would have a
different reaction. I don’t even think about my age until someone
asks me how old I am. I’m just doing my normal routine, getting
up, running, putting my pads on, doing bag work and perspiring
and I don’t have time to think about my age. I’m having too
much fun to worry about getting old. And then when someone
does ask me my age, it’s like “Ah shit, that’s right, I’m the old
guy now, this sucks.” And um, yeah. And then I’m fighting all
the young guys in their mid twenties, early twenties. And it’s like
“Dammit.” It’s good though, because people appreciate it on
the social media zoo. “Oh yeah. Oh, you are a role model for all
of us older fellows, and you’re showing us that even when we’re
a certain age that we don’t have to stop. We can keep going and
keep living the dream.”
Jujimufu: Yeah, man, you’re, you’re a pretty scary person. I got
to tell you,
John: Haaaaaa! I’m a good guy!
Jujimufu: No really. If I, if I was a 20 year old, and had to step
into the ring with you, I’d be like, “Ah shit. I better put on a
different mindset here because this guy’s a different animal.” It’s
incredible. Your fight record is nuts. You’ve won three out of
four… three out of four fights you’ve ever fought, you’ve won.
That’s… for the amount of fights that you’ve fought too! Like,
that’s a ton of fights. That’s crazy.
John: It’s crazy. Right? Uh, I remember getting the opportunity
to make the title when I was 19, it was just life changing from
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the moment I arrived because of the times. It’s not just a sport.
It’s a job. It’s a way of life, and it’s accepted by the community
too. If you’re a fighter, it’s highly respected. There’s fights on
TV nearly every night. And then there was a newspaper that
came out every single day. It told you who fought last night and
who’s fighting tonight. What the odds are. How their training
preparations been. What their last fights were like. Just like the
horse races. It’s business where people are going to the stadium
only to bet, they’re fulltime gamblers, they don’t have to work
any other jobs besides going to the Muay Thai. And betting on
the fights. So, it’s just an insane community. It’s uh, so much fun.
Jujimufu: Yeah. Well, uh, this is good. Thank you so much for
your time. That was awesome. You‘re crazy man.
John: Hey thank you for the call. It’s very cool to be invited. I
appreciate it.
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ANTOINE VAILLANT
PROFESSIONAL BODYBUILDER
Antoine Vaillant on Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/antoinev87
Antoine Vaillant on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/AntoineVai
Background: Antoine and I have been friends since 2002! His
injury occurred when I was close to finishing this book. I noticed
Antoine had adopted some sort of superhuman outlook towards
recovery. This conversation occurred 7 weeks after Antoine injured
his RIGHT bicep.
Antoine: Okay. Well, my injury happened about two weeks
before the 2019 New York Pro show, which I was trying to jump
in by surprise. I was moving something on the ground… I wasn’t
even training. And I tried to jerk it thinking it would move, that it
would slide. But because they were sheets of metal, it was bendy
up and down. But left to right, it wasn’t moving. So, I kind of like
grabbed it like a natural stone kind of thing, and I jerked it to the
left and my right bicep… I just heard the velcro sound and held
my arm. I was like, “Oh my God,” I knew what it was right away. I
look up my arm and it was separated. It went up a little bit cause
a few fibers were left on the bone, it was a full tear off the bone.
The next day I went to see the doctor to get an ultrasound, but
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then he said I have too much muscle. I had to get the MRI in
Buffalo, NY in the states cause you could pay 500 bucks and
you get it right away. So then 10 days later, I got the surgery
done. So, I have this plan here to follow after the surgery and
they said the first two weeks I had to wear a sling, I couldn’t do
anything, but I was using my fingers a little bit to like, you know,
with scissors to cut the meat and stuff in the kitchen.
Antoine: Week 2 to 6 I had a brace, and every week I increased
the range of motion. So, at the six week point I started training
isometrics. But, this training is made for normal people and I’m
a bodybuilder, I think I regenerate a little bit faster. Um, I just
started doing yesterday non-bicep involved exercises with the
injured arm. For example light (tricep) push downs, like bilateral,
and things like that. S I really listen to my body, I started putting
some blood in there, trying to get a pump in the muscles around
the bicep, and I was doing some grip stuff with the little ball and
finger extensions all the way from two weeks post op to right
now. And um, I think it does help. And it can be tricky, because
the doctor says don’t move it, don’t do anything, Blah Blah Blah.
Antoine: But it’s like counterproductive, because if you treat
your arm like it’s a crippled arm, you’re going to have a crippled
arm! If you listen to your body, and start to move it without it
hurting and being very careful, you’re going to be able to get
the range of motion back very fast. I got my range of motion
maybe in half the time I was supposed to, just to give you an
idea. And, um, so, I’m at that part now in my recovery for that.
And the hardest thing really was too, um, was more the mental
part, cause I was two weeks out from the bodybuilding show!
And then all those years of training and the crazy diet, there’s
all the minutes of cardio towards that goal and BAM! It’s been
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taken away. So, a lot of people say, “How did you deal with? You
deal with it so well?”
Antoine: Well, if you look at it like that… you don’t plan injuries,
right? But once it happens, you cannot change anything about
it. So, you can accept the situation and be like, “What can I do
right now to make the best out of this?” Because, well, what
can I learn from this? And what can I do? How can I make this
a good thing? So, I started making more videos showing the
process of the recovery. I’ve also kept my training pretty intense.
For the legs, I doubled up the leg training and I kept training my
left side also, which people think it’s kind of weird sometimes,
but the reason why I’m doing that is because nature likes things
symmetrical. So, there’s a crossover of gains kind of thing.
Antoine: So, just to put it very simple, I’m not sure if it’s exactly
like this, but if you gain one inch on the left arm, even if you
don’t train the right, the right is gonna gain a fifth of an inch:
20% crossover. So, by training with my whole left side, my right
side is holding onto more muscle because the body’s like, “Well,
if there’s still a lot of work we have to do, might as well keep more
muscle. Right?” So, my right arm at the smallest, uh, was 18.5
inches, and my left was 21 inches. Just to give you an idea. But
my chest is very similar. My back is very similar to what it was. My
shoulder a little bit less. It’s not too bad.
Antoine: My recovery is gonna be really good. I train the left
side because of that reason. Also, I upped my cardio. What I’m
doing now is I’m preparing my body so when it’s time to start
training hardcore again, my heart is going to be like, ready. I’m
going to have better cardio, my legs are going to be huge, my left
side will have helped my right side to keep up, also I can train to
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burn calories and stay active. And also! I just love training. So, I
just keep training. I could be in the gym every day still. I upped
my cardio more than the contest prep! So, I tried to just, “What
can I do to make this good and what’s the best that I can do?”
because… when you have an injury or anything in life. I guess
the best that you can do… Is your best!
Antoine: That’s all. So, if you’re doing your best right now, the
rest is up for grabs. The rest is out of your control. I think my
recovery is going very fast because I stayed positive and I’m doing
everything I can to make it recover fast… with patience of course,
and smarts. And um, that’s the way I’m dealing with it right now.
I think it’s going well, but I’m trying to think of some things that I
could’ve done better. I don’t think so. And the thing is, if you dwell
on it and you’re like sitting at home, “Oh I’m not going to train my
left side, and what’s the point of going to the gym?” Well you’re
going to be so far back. Right now, the only thing that my body
has to do, is gain a few grams or pounds of muscle.
Antoine: How many pounds are there in the right arm? I don’t
know, like, let’s say I have to gain a pound and a half. A pound
and a half versus if I was to stop training and would have to gain
25 pounds! It’s like, way easier for the body to gain just a pound
and a half! So, if you have an injury, if you can still move, you can
still train. As long as I’m gonna move, I’m gonna train. So that’s
pretty much my mindset with this right now. I’m doing my best
and I already have a show in mind, which is next year. The same
ones, the New York Pro and the Toronto Pro. Can I be ready
before that? We’ll see. But um, I actually think that because I’ve
been training less heavy overall, my body is actually resting on
the non-injured side also. So, when it’s time to rev it back up,
when I’m all healthy again, I’m going to be even better.
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Antoine: I’m actually seeing this like, “Okay, this happened. Is
there a reason why this happened? I’m going to learn something
from it.” And I’m just gonna keep the same training mentality as
I had before with regarding training. And I’m keeping my diet on
point, maybe 85%. The other thing that you know is harder, is
I’m so hungry. Um, I’m eating more food than I’m supposed to
a little bit. But regarding the injury, I don’t think it matters that
much. You know, maybe you just need to try to avoid the foods
that create inflammation. Things like that. But yeah, if you eat
healthy it’s not really a problem. I gain a lot of weight very fast
and I was watery for a little while because of the rebound before
the show. But now I’m like, uh, at a healthy weight of 299 pounds.
Jujimufu: HAHAHAHA! A healthy weight of 299 lbs?!
Antoine: Yeah, that’s my homeostasis weight I think. You know,
when your body wants to go somewhere? My body wants to
be 300 pounds for some reason. I’m not forcing myself to go
up. I’ve actually increasing my cardio and trying to go down a
little bit and my body is just staying there. So, I think that’s my
healthy weight right now.
Jujimufu: Yeah, that’s uhh… I can remember a couple of years
ago talking to you and, uh, we were joking about you going over
300 pounds when you were 280 pounds. You were like, “Maybe
I should do it? Maybe. Maybe I should go above 300.” And now
you’ve been like 312 lbs? Was that your heaviest?
Antoine: Yeah. My heaviest weight was last winter. One time I
went to bed at like 315 lbs.
Jujimufu: Yeah, you’ve, uh, you’ve totally gone beyond 300 lbs
now, so yeah.
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Antoine: I could be 330 lbs if I want to… but like, right now, it’s
kind of pointless. I think I’d rather stay 300 and just, uh, work
on quality.
Jujimufu: And stay healthy. And then, uh, when you get closer to
your contest, then you can start to tax your system some more?
Antoine: Yeah. Exactly. I was 260 lbs when the injury happened.
I was shredded. I was like, I was ready to like fucking win some
shows. And I think next time I’m gonna be heavier, I’ll be better.
And um, in my whole 16 years of training, this is the first injury
I had that was just kind of bad like this. It wasn’t even during
training. I think, oh, I think I’m going to talk about the mistake I
made and why the injury happened.
Jujimufu: Yeah. Yeah. I was actually wondering why? How did it
happen? Like, you know, I can’t imagine other people just going
and trying to move something and tearing their bicep like that. I
mean, how? What actually caused it?
Antoine: I think because, um, I was so dry already (dehydrated).
And because one thing I was doing was, during the night when I
was waking up, I was not drinking water. I was trying to not drink
water because in the morning, I wanted to weigh myself and have
the lowest weight possible. Cause I like to have a consistent
weigh in. Like, I don’t want to influence my weight accidentally. I
wanted to send my real, dry weight to Dorian (Dorian Hamilton,
Antoine’s coach) every morning to see real body fat changes,
and to have no water. Right? So, because I would be training
after one meal, I probably didn’t have enough water in my body.
I was probably training dehydrated and um, maybe that was one
of the factors why it happened two weeks out.
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Antoine: Uh, you’re not supposed to move shit off the ground
like that. There was something in my way, and I wanted to move
it. And that day I didn’t warm up as well either right before
the workout. I think maybe that, combined with the fact that
I was super dry, cause when you’re leaning out like that before
a show, there’s no fluid and liquid in the tendons in the muscle.
It’s like you’re dehydrated, right? And because I was not drinking
during the night, and there was no time in the morning to really
rehydrate, I was probably even more dehydrated. So, I think that’s
maybe a reason why. To prevent that in the future, I actually got
a new water system. The water distillery thing. So, it evaporates
the water into the filter then it comes out and I add my own little
minerals. Haha.
Jujimufu: Yeah yeah yeah I saw it.
Antoine: I’m doing that right now, so next time I’m going to
drink, I’m probably gonna weigh the water or like measure the
water. Every time I wake up, I’m going to drink two cups during
the night. So I stay hydrated during the night. And if I do it
from the start of my contest prep, I will always ensure the same
amount of water intake every night and maybe I will always train
after two meals. So, now I have more carbs and will train with
more water in me to prevent problems. And I will not move any
fucking shit off the ground. Even if there’s an old lady with her
groceries who needs help, she can go fuck herself.
Jujimufu: LOL
Antoine: I’m not lifting anything but the weights in the proper
form, right? So uh, that’s what I’m gonna do to prevent this next
time. But you can’t really be in control of it 100%. You could
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walk on down the street, get clipped by a fucking car and then
you’re injured. You’re gonna have to deal with it. And uh, so
the best thing you can do when an injury happens is, like, okay,
accept it. Cry if you gotta cry. And then be like, “What can I do
to fix it?” And come back fast, and efficiently. So, um, that’s what
I have to say right now.
Jujimufu: Yeah, that’s perfect.
Antoine: Oh, good. There you go.
Jujimufu: Thank you. Yeah!
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MARTINS LICIS
PROFESSIONAL STRONGMAN
Martins Licis on Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/martinslicis
Martins Licis on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/user/MartinsLicis
Background: The first time I met Martins was at a fitness expo
many years ago. He was a giant, happy man that wanted to show
me his back lever (a gymnastics move). I was so impressed, surely
at his weight, this feat of strength was some kind of world record!?
We kept bumping into each other and became great friends and this
year he won his first World’s Strongest Man title! Martins Licis is
the World’s Strongest Man 2019!
Martins: I pride myself for staying injury free for so long. And,
it’s only when the weights got ridiculous leading up to World’s
Strongest Man and post World’s Strongest Man that I just
started accumulating injuries, especially cause I had a huge spike
in strength over the last few years. But one thing I really believe
about injuries is: of course, preventing them. Which is making
sure that you can keep all your imbalances and deficiencies
in check. Because I feel lifting in any motion with imbalance
or deficiency somewhere along the chain being used, and of
course, you know, you can lift in a way that won’t be ideal and
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hurt yourself. But when I do injure myself…. For example, I tore
my pec. The doctors told me I would be in a sling for about six
weeks or more and I wouldn’t be able to lift with that arm for
about half of a year. So, of course I wasn’t going to have that!
Because I’m a professional strongman.
Jujimufu: Hahaha!
Martins: (laughing)
Martins: So, after about one week of being in a sling, I just
started to do little circles with my elbows, not like big... And I’m
literally talking about one to two-inch diameters. Just rotations.
Moving my elbow in little circles. Now, I’d do that CONSTANTLY
throughout the day, otherwise my shoulder was just frozen. I had
a pec reattached, so really, I couldn’t do much more than that.
But what that did was, by continuously doing this all day long,
it flushed a lot more blood into the area around the tendon.
Of course, tendons don’t really have, um, blood vessels running
through them. They get all their nutrients from a peripheral
blood supply. So just by continuously moving my arm, I was able
to flush a lot of blood into that area and that helped my pec heal
much quicker. So, in about two weeks I was already taking my
sling off and then straightening my arm.
Martins: So, I was just practicing straightening my arm, moving
my arm in circles just to heal that tendon, and to flush blood
through there. And uh, then just over the next week or two I
started working on it: really pushing the range of motion, but
very slowly, making sure it did not hurt, whichever kind of ranges
did not hurt. I would practice this. After three weeks, I was
already lifting weights. Again: I was supposed to be in a sling, but
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I’d only practice pulling motions with my right arm that was hurt
just to, again, continue flushing blood in there and to activate
whatever muscles. Even though I’m activating the antagonist of
my pressing muscles, the pressing muscles still received some
sort of impulse from even the pulling motions I did.
Martins: My pressing started to come back. And I believe that
much quicker! If I didn’t do those pulling motions, my pressing
recovery would have suffered. But then, after about four weeks,
I’d start doing very light pressing overhead. Literally just using
my arm. No external weights. And slowly built up my strength
using repetition ranges of about 15 to 20. But the moment I
started to struggle, I would completely stop the motion. You
know, I did that very carefully with a very slow pace, slow tempo,
uh, keeping complete control of whatever pressing motions I was
doing at all points.
Martins: Four weeks out from my injury, I started doing very light
dumbbell pressing work in all different angles and directions I
possibly could, just to build up the dynamic range of motion
in my, uh, in my shoulder joints, and also just to build up that
tendon strength at every single angle I possibly could. And
by also working within a tempo that is a slow pace during my
repetitions, I was making sure that my muscles were activating
equally during the entire range of motion rather than just
getting that initial impulse from the beginning, and relying on
momentum, which of course could tear apart the tendon that
was just repaired. So, by working really slowly, I, um, put a lot less
stress on the tendon, allowing it to heal better while building up
that strength again.
Jujimufu: So how long ago was this injury?
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Martins: This was two years ago. (August 2017).
Jujimufu: And it’s been a complete recovery?
Martins: Yeah. So I mean, I’m using my arm perfectly fine.
Jujimufu: Wow. That’s incredible. It’s uhhh, do you have any, uh,
did you do anything else? I mean that just sounds like… very
good. It just sounds like what you’re supposed to do that a lot
of people don’t do when they’re trying to recover from an injury.
Martins: I was OBSESSIVE.
Jujimufu: Ohhhhh….
Martins: Certainly obsessive. The thing with any kind of tendon
injuries is keeping motion on it. At least whatever motions that
do not hurt: do them. And a lot of them, obsessively. Because
tendons don’t receive a lot of blood flow. So, you basically have
to push a lot of blood into them, whichever methods you can
find. And I think motion is better than anything, because while
you’re moving, you’re also practicing and, uh, lubricating the
joints and ensuring that they don’t get frozen in any positions,
so you can keep your range of motion versus if you go through
other methods. Like, people will rely on hot, cold, for example,
to flush blood into their body to heal an injury. That’s fine. But if
you just purely rely on that, you’re promoting stiffness of joints.
Jujimufu: I see yeah. Is there anything that you do in strongman
that’s more dangerous than other things?
Martins: Oh, interesting. Um, let me think about that. I think
block pressing over head, I’ve never actually seen anyone injured
from pressing blocks, but every single time I press a block over
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300 lbs over my head… my life flashes before my eyes. One slip
and there is this giant aluminum block falling on my face.
Jujimufu: Yeahahaha!
Martins: It’s so scary! Every single time.
Jujimufu: It seems like, uh, when you get up to that level of
strength, almost all that stuff gets scary because it’s so heavy. I
mean, I can’t even imagine like the super yoke walk, you know?
Martins: Yeah, for sure. Uh, that’s the other thing you know,
when I’m doing Yoke carries, I don’t have deep hip sockets. Um,
which is good for squatting, good for tire flips. Great for stones
because I have great hip mobility compared to a lot of other
big guys. But when I do yoke carries or anything brutally heavy
like that because of my shallow hip sockets, I feel instability in
those joints. So I have to be meticulously focused on uhhh…
stabilizing my hips while I’m carrying a yoke. It’s like there’s this
fine balance of trying to push that speed, and also making sure
my hips don’t pop out.
Jujimufu: Huh?! Pop out?! Like out of the socket?
Martins: Oh yeah, for sure. I don’t know if it would happen, but
that’s the sensation! That if I go a little bit faster, my legs are
popping out.
Jujimufu: Tsss!? I can’t even relate to this. This sounds so insane.
Haha!
Martins: Yeah. Then if it’s one of those things where it’s like, I
even have like slight missteps, I just drop the weight immediately
because it feels like my leg’s about to crank off.
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Jujimufu: I guess you don’t really have these problems until you
get up to a certain body weight?
Martins: IT’S TRUE! This is completely true! To me it feels like
there’s a barrier above anything about 900 pounds. Suddenly I
am uhhh, every single time I’m like hugging my legs, telling them,
giving them good little stories of affirmation, telling them that
it’s going to be okay.
Jujimufu: We’ve flown other strongmen to my place before to
train and it seems like a lot of them have problems with like,
dehydration, and on airplanes and stuff like that. Like, their fluid
levels, electrolyte levels… You ever have any problems with that
type of stuff? Does that affect you?
Martins: You can even remember when I flew out to go train
with you, I was dehydrated and you had me swallow a bunch
of basically electrolyte pills, salt packets, and chug a bunch of
water. And then about 30 minutes later I was feeling totally fine.
And the thing is I’m always drinking, and I’m always trying to get
those electrolytes in. But it’s sneaky because uh, it’s very easy
to not get enough.
Jujimufu: It’s gotten harder since you’ve gotten heavier?
Martins: Yes, very much so.
Jujimufu: Jesus. Okay. Wow. Um, well now that you just won the
World’s Strongest Man, I guess you gotta win it again, right?
Martins: That’s the plan.
Jujimufu: So, are you going to do anything different or just
continue doing the same plan?
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Martins: Very much so the same. But I think I could add
somethings. For recovery for example, I want to try PRP on my
knees cause I think I have a slight meniscus tear in my left knee.
I’m yet to get an MRI. I’ve just been living the last year in denial.
I have not seen a doctor or gotten the MRI, but uh, yeah, there’s
a little pain in the left knee that I want to get checked out. And
possibly get PRP or whatever is needed for that to make sure I
could last another four years. At this point my goal is to go until
I’m 33 years old. I’m about to turn 29, so I’m giving myself four
more years.
Jujimufu: Are you more or less worried about injuring yourself
now that you’ve gotten this far? Do you feel like all these years
of training have kind of gotten you to a point where you feel
really stable with your body and your performance?
Martins: Ummm. Hm! Every single time I lift something heavy
there is that thought that crosses my mind. I’m definitely getting
more confident; I’m getting more confident with the weights
I have already lifted. What I am cautious with, is pushing my
strengths to a new level. So sometimes I’m maintaining, I don’t
have too much worry. My body is pretty used to the motions.
And I could pretty much lift almost anything painlessly that I’ve
already lifted. But it’s when I’m trying to hit a new record on a
deadlift, or a new record on an overhead event, that those fears
really creep back in.
Jujimufu: Okay. So, like a 400 pound block press overhead?
Martins: Oh gosh, oh no, no, no. That’s like, that’s something
that’ll keep me up at night!
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HAFÞÓR JÚLÍUS BJÖRNSSON
PROFESSIONAL STRONGMAN
Hafþór Björnsson on Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/thorbjornsson/
Hafþór Björnsson on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEeUUmYprI6qZ7SqkIJiDMA/
Thor’s website: http://www.hafthorbjornsson.com
Background: Thor is a legendary strongman and, he’s the biggest
human I’ve ever stood next to. He also played the character
The Mountain on Game of Thrones. His Strongman record is
outstanding, and he owns the title of World’s Strongest Man 2018.
He invited us to his house for breakfast, and we recorded a podcast
after; This was a portion of the conversation we had on Tom
Boyden’s podcast: OK PODCAST on YouTube. This was episode
#3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNYWIZku1xE
Thor: Working 18 hours a day, I have done that in the past.
There’s not many days like that, but I have. Then I’m not training
the day after. I’m sleeping or resting. I just have to rest. There’s
no way I’m training after 18 hours of filming. So I try to, for
example, work my training schedule around that, you know? I
find the days I’m not working as long in the schedule, then we
are training on those days. If I’m filming for 18 hours, there’s no
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way I’m training after that.
Jujimufu: So, do you get into those situations knowing that
you’re gonna be filming for 18 hours, or is it just kind of sprung
upon you?
Thor: Usually I know… But there are days that, maybe, filming
drags out. Or maybe it didn’t go as smoothly as they wanted to,
or they want to film something extra.
Jujimufu: I’m kind of curious, you’re talking about consistency.
When do you know when to go with the flow? Like “Damn, I just
was on the set for 18 hours. I better like, hang it up for the night,
recover and rest my body.” And when do you go, “Okay, well it
doesn’t matter, I have to get this training session in.” I mean, how
do you make those decisions?
Thor: I listen to my body a lot, how my body feels. If I feel like
I need an extra day… Sleep is very important to me. If I haven’t
slept enough, then we’re not training, that’s just a principle. Lack
of sleep can increase the risk of injury. And I don’t want to get
injured. If you get injured, then you’re away from training for
how long? Like how many weeks? You don’t even know. Depends
on how bad the injury is. So, I always make sure that I’m well
hydrated, well fed, and well rested before training.
Jujimufu: It’s just lowering the risk.
Thor: Yeah, lowering the risk. And I think that’s a huge key why I
haven’t been getting injured in the last couple of years. Because
I always take care of my body. I take care, I always have good
nutrition in my body, and I’m well rested. So yeah, my body is
just ready to attack the weights.
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Thor: Cause that’s the key. Stay injury free so we can just keep
on training better and better.
Tom: So, this is going into both injury and recovery. Is injury
on your mind all the time? Because your body is your tool, you
know, it’s your livelihood. Do you have that just on your mind at
all times? Preventing that? Or is it something that you just try
to focus doing the positive things to prevent it?
Thor: Yeah, I try to think about the positive to not get injured.
But yeah, it’s always in the back of my head. I’m always careful,
you know. But um, you have to know the limit. You have to know
how far you are able to push yourself. And you have to know
when to take a step back and say this is enough. I have to make
sure I don’t get injured. That’s something that people just have
to figure out on their own. It is very hard to teach.
Tom: That’s experiential. Um, then the training environments,
I mean, a big thing about injuries and recovery is training
environments. I mean, the World’s Strongest Man is in climates
completely different than Iceland. Botswana, Manila, all these
places. And you’re going to Dubai, it’s a very, very different
climate. How do you transition training to Dubai, and do you
have to do different things because of the heat and the dryness
compared to Iceland?
Thor: Yeah. That’s where experience kicks in as well. I’ve trained
in those environments many times before. And I know how to
react, and what I usually do when the time difference is huge and
the weather is a lot different, you know. I arrive usually a week
before competition just to get used to it. Get used to the heat,
whatever it is, so I’m ready when the competition starts. And I’ve
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competed almost everywhere in the world. So, I’m usually very
quick to adapt to the changes. But the biggest thing I could
do is arrive quicker. I don’t arrive just a day before, or two days
before. I arrive usually five days before.
Tom: Okay. And you’ll do that for any event?
Thor: Yeah, any big event I do that for.
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STEFI COHEN
PROFESSIONAL POWERLIFTER
Stefi Cohen on Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/steficohen/
Stefi Cohen on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMoe2ZnSFIFcayGVv__xFEA
Hayden Bowe on Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/hayden.bowe
www.hybridperformancemethod.com
Background: At the time of writing this, Stefi has 22 All-Time World
Records in Powerlifting. She and her significant other, Hayden, run a
very successful training business called Hybrid Performance Method
(Look like a bodybuilder, lift like a powerlifter, move like a weightlifter).
I cooked Stefi and Hayden a nice and healthy dinner and then
ambushed them with a request to talk about training injuries. LOL!
They gave me so much more of their time than I expected. Stefi is
an exercise physiologist and doctor of physical therapy. Enjoy this
comprehensive and educated perspective of training injuries.
Jujimufu: Okay guys, I want to talk to you about injuries.
Stefi: Sure. I mean, injuries are THE limiting factor for athletes.
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It’s like if you can’t train for a long time, then you will never
get as good as you can get. So, in powerlifting specifically, it’s
particularly true because you don’t get good at power lifting
with a couple of years of training, or three years of training.
You get good at powerlifting with more than five years, and it’s
such a brutal sport in such repetitive movements. If you have a
back injury and you can’t squat, then what are you going to do?
Versus like other sports that you can get around those injuries
a lot easier. In power lifting, if you have an injury… back or knee
or shoulder, then that completely eliminates one third of what
you can do, and then you can’t compete because you need that
part of your body to compete.
Stefi: So, I think a common element in the best power lifters is
that they can train for a long, long time. So like Ed Coan, how
many years did he do powerlifting for, 30 years or something like
that? So that’s what gets you good. Being able to compete for a
long time and being able to stay on your feet. Every time that you
have an injury, then that sets you back how long? Who knows?
Depends on the injury. If you’re set back by three months, then
you have those three months to come back PLUS another three
months to get 1% better. So, if you can save yourself that injury
altogether, then that’s when you’re really going to see yourself
making progress. When it comes to injuries, um, there’s five
things that I kind of identified that are really, really important
to take into consideration when you have an injury, regardless of
which injury you have.
Stefi: The first one, and actually it’s going to be six then because
this is a new one that I thought about.
Jujimufu: Oh, just now?!
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Stefi: Like recently cause…
Jujimufu: Oh sick…
Stefi: Yeah. So, the first one is self-diagnosing. Well, obviously the
Internet is great as a place to find information. But if you’re not
a qualified medical professional, you’re not going to understand
the full picture, and you’re going to kind of get to conclusions
that are maybe not the right one for your particular case. You’re
diagnosing yourself, and then you are looking up the diagnosis
on the Internet, and then you are looking at symptoms, recovery
time, and maybe it doesn’t apply to you. Right?
Hayden: WebMD tells you everything is cancer.
Stefi: Exactly. So, say you have some sort of like. rotator cuff
injury or a back injury or an ankle injury, and you see that the
recovery time is six weeks. Then people really count on those
six weeks to get better. And then yeah, those six weeks pass,
and they get back into it because the Internet said six weeks.
But everyone heals at a different rate, and our bodies are not
programmed like robots. We all heal at different rates. You can’t
really take whatever the Internet says to heart, cause that’s not
the way it happens.
Jujimufu: But, you would probably agree that a lot of doctors
estimate recovery times based on people that aren’t super
athletes that recover super-fast.
Stefi: Yeah, exactly, or you can heal faster.
Jujimufu: Because every injury I’ve ever gotten, the doctor
always overestimated the amount of time it would take for me to
get back into it.
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Stefi: Yeah that’s common too. And that actually happened to
me recently with a back injury. I was told that I was going to have
to take 18 months off.
Jujimufu: And how long did you take off?
Stefi: A week.
Jujimufu: FUCK, FUCK! ARE YOU SERIOUS?
Stefi: A week –
Jujimufu: 18 months is… what are you? And I thought you’re
going to say like… a month…
Stefi: I took a week off and within four weeks, I hit a world record
squat. In training.
Jujimufu: Oh, go to hell.
Stefi: Exactly.
Jujimufu: That’s nuts.
Stefi: It can happen both ways, right? But at the end of the day,
just understand that everybody’s different. And even a doctor
tells you that you have some estimated recovery time, it could
be less or it could be more. So, just keeping that in mind: this is
the hardest one for athletes. Stop doing the thing that’s hurting
you. Hardest one. Hardest one, cause you don’t want to stop
doing whatever it is that you need to do in your sport. If throwing
is your sport, you don’t want to stop throwing. If you have a
back injury in powerlifting, you don’t want to stop squatting and
deadlifting. Right? Cause you’re scared that you’re going to lose
your gains.
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Stefi: But, the first thing is to stop doing the aggravating thing
so that you can let your body heal, essentially. And I think most
of the fear comes from regressing in your training. But those
people don’t understand that, obviously. You’re gonna lose your
strength? You might lose your strength... It doesn’t happen that
fast. You’re not gonna forget how to snatch in a week or two, or
a month. You’re not going to forget how to squat. You’re not
going to get significantly weaker. Even if you do, it’s not going to
take you the same amount of time that it took you to get that
strong, to gain that strength back.
Jujimufu: I got a math question for you.
Stefi: Go ahead.
Jujimufu: All right. Let’s say you don’t do the thing that’s hurting
you, right? And right when you recognize there’s something
wrong, you immediately don’t do that thing and you start
training around it and try to make it better. Can you take that
recovery time and make it a week, for example? Whereas if you
keep trying to train through it, it could set you back by months?
Stefi: Hundred percent. And that’s why I say it.
Jujimufu: So, it can get exponentially worse. The more you try
to train through a problem?
Stefi: Absolutely.
Jujimufu: So, it’s better to… fix it sooner…
Stefi: As soon as our alarm goes off, you take a step back, you
immediately stop doing what’s hurting you. The more you pick
at it, the worse and worse… the deeper the cut and -
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Jujimufu: It gets way, way worse.
Stefi: Way worse.
Hayden: You know what’s so funny, is that doctors take so much
heat for telling people to take time off. Like, an athlete will go
to the doctor and say, “Oh, my knee hurts when I do this.” And
they’ll say, “Well, don’t do that.” And then the athlete will be
like, “Pfff.”
Stefi: “Don’t do that?! What do you know about training? !!!”
Hayden: Right? How many times have you heard that? Right?
It’s like, “Whoa.” It’s so obvious. Like, of course stop doing the
thing that’s injured. You know, like how could you scoff at them
for that?
Stefi: Yeah! It’s hurting me to deadlift. Ummm, okay, how about
you don’t deadlift for a little bit? And see what happens. Try to
figure out why it’s happening in the first place. And avoid doing
whatever movements have been bugging you.
Jujimufu: Or, a lot of times they could just be changing the
movement a little bit. Right? I mean, you could take a deadlift
that is hurting you and be like, “What if I dead lift this way
instead?” “Oh, it’s still good form.”
Hayden: I just did that recently. Leading up to a meet I tore an
oblique and I couldn’t, uh, do conventional deadlifts. I couldn’t
even do one plate. Conventional. And I tried switching to sumo
because it’s a way more upright position. I didn’t have to like, be
hanging over the bar. And I wasn’t able to do my best obviously
at the meet, but I still was able to do 606 lbs (275 kgs) with a
sumo stance at the meet, instead of just 135 lbs.
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Jujimufu: Yeah. LOL. Okay. Well, mission accomplished.
Stefi: The second thing is habituation. So, there’s a lot of
relatively new pain science coming out about how pain always
starts in the brain. And especially when you have chronic pain,
it doesn’t always come from tissue damage. So, if you have an
acute injury, you twist your ankle or like, I don’t know, you have
a direct blow on your shoulder or whatever, something happens
to your elbow when you’re arm wrestling and you feel pain,
then that might actually be real pain, something got messed
up. But, when you go months experiencing that pain, it doesn’t
necessarily indicate that there’s actually an injury. The analogy
that I like to use is um, a fire alarm, or not a fire alarm a, ummmm,
a smoke detector. So, sometimes the smoke detector goes off
when you’re cooking right? What does that really mean? There’s
no real fire in your house. The smoke detector is just kind of
more sensitive to whatever smoke is going on. So, it’s giving you
a false alarm, there’s no fire.
Jujimufu: So, you’re saying some pain receptors are more
sensitive?
Stefi: Yeah.
Juimufu: So, there is a pain response for no reason?
Stefi: That can absolutely happen, because like I said, pain starts
in the brain. It’s a perceptual thing. Pain is a perceptual thing
that can arise from emotions. Like, for example, um, if you’ve
gotten injured doing a deadlift, right? And you actually messed
up a ligament, or you messed up a disc, or whatever, and it took
you a couple of weeks to recover. The pain goes away, whatever.
You heal.
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Stefi: And then sometimes next year you bend over to deadlift,
and the pain comes back. Nothing really happened to your disc
this time. You get an MRI, it’s fine. But you still experienced the
pain. It 100% can be tied to the emotional component of doing
a deadlift and the perception that you have from doing that
movement.
Jujimufu: How do you fix that?
Stefi: So, I’ll tell you, another cool, really cool example. There’s
this researcher, Lorimer Moseley, and he talked a lot about that,
that’s what he does the bulk of his research in. And he tells a
story about one time that he was doing a hike in a mountain.
He’s walking, he trips on something that catches his leg. He feels
it, “Ah, that, that bothered my leg a little bit.” He keeps walking
for like, 10 more minutes, and then all of a sudden he starts
feeling faint. He’s feeling like he’s going to throw up, he passes
out, wakes up in the hospital and they tell him that he got bit by
a super poisonous snake.
Stefi: But, he barely felt it, because in his brain that didn’t register
as something that was dangerous. The second time, say two years
later, he was in a very similar situation: taking a hike. He felt a
branch poke him on the shin, and the pain response was completely
different. Like it was extreme. He was grabbing his leg, and like fell
on the floor and was crying and thought that something terrible
had happened. But it was just a branch. When he inspected his
leg, it was just a branch. So, it just goes to show how your brain
can perceive different situations differently, and either amplify or
diminish the pain signal depending on the emotional attachment
and the perception of that particular situation. That’s called
sensitization, which is what I was talking about: the smoke alarm.
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Stefi: Sensitization can do exactly that. Your brain perceives
something, magnifies something, or diminishes something. The
opposite of sensitization is habituation, and that’s pretty much
trying to restore the normal way. Habituation is the answer to
your question: “How do you fix that?” That’s just kind of trying to
restore a normal response from your brain. And there’s different
ways of doing that really, depending on the injury. But I’ll tell
you… I’ll tell you how I did it for my lower back injury for example.
Jujimufu: Was your lower back a smoke alarm?
Stefi: Yeah. It was really bad. I went to four different people, it
hurt so much, like I could barely walk. I went to four different
people and I got four different diagnoses, and I was really
frustrated because I didn’t know, and I’m a PT myself! So I had
five different diagnoses then! I had one myself! Right?
Jujimufu: Jesus,
Stefi: Right. I had no idea what was going on and um, where was
I going with this story? Oh yeah, this is sensational!
Jujimufu: LOL
Stefi: This injury kept recurring every year, it would come back
and back and back. And one of the ways that I’ve been able
to get past it, every time, and not only get past it but surpass
whatever weights I’ve been lifting… You know, it’s a mental block:
It’s your back, you need that a lot. Right?
Jujimufu: It’s connected to everything.
Stefi: Exactly.
Juimufu: In my opinion back injuries are the worst injuries.
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Stefi: Absolutely. There’s a very strong emotional component
to back injuries, just because there’s a vital organ that goes
through it. You know, you have your spinal cord, that’s there,
you kinda need that. And it’s just kind of the base of everything.
So, every time that I’ve had that injury, I’ve had to go through
the psychological portion of dealing with the injury, which is
even more important than the physical portion, because once
it’s been long enough after the injury, you know for a fact that
you’re healed. Based on physiological healing, your bones are
healed, your ligaments are healed, your tendons, muscles are
healed, but you’re still experiencing pain.
Stefi: So that’s when, you know, all right, like I need to, in my
mind get past this. For me, it was always bending forward. That
hurt. I couldn’t touch my toes without being in excruciating pain.
And it was extremely stiff. So, habituation exercises for your
spine involve putting yourself in the position that you’re trying
to restore without putting yourself in that position. That brings
back the pain signal, the perception. For example, you can still
perform spine flexion, but not only by bending forward. This was
one of the exercises that I used to do for my back. (Stefi is sitting
in a chair). So, you bring your legs up while you’re sitting down
and then you point your head down, and then you point your
toes down. That is spine flexion. But I’m not standing, I’m not
bending over to pick up a barbell, so I don’t associate that as
painful. So just kind of slowly exposing yourself to the movement
that your body perceives as painful, to try to rewire your brain
and tell your brain, “Hey, this position that I’m putting myself in
is safe, there’s no reason why you should be turning on that pain
alarm. There’s no reason why this should be painful. This is a safe
position for you.” Essentially.
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Jujimufu: Have you heard of Phantom limb pain?
Stefi: Yeah.
Jujimufu: The mirror box.
Stefi: Yeah. Yeah.
Jujimufu: Is that a treatment related to this.
Stefi: Yeah. Um, yeah, similar to an extent. It is habituation.
You’re telling your brain, “Hey, look, you know, there’s no arm,
you shouldn’t be experiencing that pain.”
Stefi: Whatever. It’s the same thing or similar.
Jujimufu: I love how I asked you about this and you have all
these notes on your phone.
Stefi: YEAH! Yeah. And I think about this a lot.
Jujimufu: This is great.
Stefi: Okay. Uh, third or fourth, whatever, I lost track!
Understanding that tissue adaptation takes time. And we briefly
alluded to that at the beginning. Just understanding different
healing times and understanding that most injuries, if not all,
occur when the load that you’re applying to the tissues or your
body exceeds the tissue tolerance or the tissue capacity. So,
there is an equation that has two parts. You have the load, and
then you have the tissue tolerance or the capacity. Obviously
increasing the capacity of those tissues is going to be beneficial
in the long run. Like when you’re getting back from that injury,
understanding that the other part of the equation is the load.
Load management is huge. Sometimes people get super hung up
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on what the diagnosis of the particular injury is. But what it is,
is not that important because most injuries, if not all, happened
because the load was too much.
Stefi: So, don’t get so hung up on what the name that the doctor
wants to give it is, just focus on the solution to the problem and
understand the essence, because they’re the same. The plan of
care is usually the same for almost every injury.
Jujimufu: So, you’re saying that you weren’t strong enough for
the load, and now you’re weaker because you’re injured, and
now you have to strengthen the area again? Is that true?
Stefi: Yeah. The load that you were lifting or that you put your
body through exceeded what the tissues could withstand. It
doesn’t always have to be a weight thing either. Let’s say you’re
a construction worker, you bend over, your maximum capacity
or tolerance was 100 bend overs a day, and you did 101, so
your back got messed up. It’s because you did too many reps.
You know? There’s only so much that your ligaments, tendons,
muscles, and spine can hold. Nothing is forever. Nothing is
infinite. Something has to give at some point if you don’t keep
increasing the tolerance of the tissue or manage your loads. So,
it’s that two part equation that you always need to kind of have
in balance. You can’t always lift at 100% right? That’s why you
modulate your intensity week by week. If you want to keep lifting
at 100%, 102%, 105% then you also have to strengthen not
only your muscles, but also your tendons and your ligaments.
Like, that’s why we do accessories, you know? And that’s why we
do all the other things that we do. So thatJujimufu: Other goofy exercises that people don’t want to do
because they’re boring, but if they actually want to be able to
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do their 101%, 102%, 105%, 110% on their competitive liftsStefi: That has to go up.
Jujimufu: If that’s their goal, that other stuff has to go up too.
Stefi: It’s a 1 to 1 relationship, you increase the load, you
increase your tissue capacity. Once one is out of whack, then
you’re pretty much guaranteed to have an injury. So, there is a lot
of talk on tissue capacity. Say if you go on Instagram or YouTube,
there are so many different exercises that you should be doing
for your knee health, whatever. What about load management?!
Load management is huge! And not only in powerlifting, but in
anything. And say arm wrestling, how many reps and sets are
you doing? Like you can’t always do 100 reps, eh, what’s that
called?
Jujimufu: Arm Movement things against other people? Pfff haha!
Stefi: Every week. Right? You gotta undulate that somehow.
Sometimes you’re not going to do a hundred. Sometimes you’re
only going to do 20, to let your body recover from them.
Jujimufu: Sometimes you deload. It’s basic programming.
Stefi: Exactly.
Hayden: Yeah. Load in that sense is sort of like an all encompassing term.
Stefi: Exactly. And then understanding why does the injury happen
in the first place? So, you have the load, and then you have the
tissue tolerance or the capacity, and in between there’s um, is
what I call a margin of safety. That margin of safety gets really,
really thin once you’ve had an injury. Or when, um, when you’re
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in the acute phases of an injury, for example. You have almost no
room for play. When you get further and further from the injury,
you’re recovering, then that margin of safety gets longer.
Jujimufu: You have to be careful right after an injury.
Stefi: You gotta be very careful. You have a very small margin of
safety, so maybe you used to do 4 sets of 10 in the leg press,
whatever, if you’re trying to rehab your knee, you might only be
able to get one set of six, and that’s okay for that portion of
the other recovery process. Yeah. So, understand that the more
acute the injury, the smaller the margin of safety. The further
away you get from the injury, and the better you get at pain
tolerance, the bigger that margin of safety.
Jujimufu: But, even if it’s just one set of six with a very small
margin of safety, that’s going to increase your margin of safety
because that’s what you need.
Stefi: Exactly. You have to go there! You can’t just avoid pain,
you can’t just avoid movements forever. You have to put yourself
in the positions of pain. So if it’s flexion, you have to put yourself
in that position. Otherwise, you’re always going to fear it and
the pain is always going to come back, and you also have to
move, so that you can increase the tissue capacity and tolerance
so that you can get back to increasing loads.
Hayden: You also have a level of pain. Right? That’s acceptable
in those areas.
Stefi: Yeah. So, how do you choose whether or not you should
do an exercise? You’d just use a mental pain threshold. Like a
pain scale and… And obviously it’s subjective. It’s hard because
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some people have bigger and smaller pain tolerances, but maybe
this is the only way they’ve been able to kind of manage loads.
So, you have a scale from 0 to 10, 10 being the most painful, 0
being no pain at all. As long as you stay below a 3, you’re good.
Jujimufu: Yeah. Wow. Below a 3?
Stefi: Below a 3. You should never be pushing past a 3 when you
have an injury,
Jujimufu: An acute injury.
Stefi: Yeah. An acute injury.
Jujimufu: Okay.
Stefi: Exactly. There’s no reason to go higher. 3 is a good point
where you should stop and avoid that moment that you’re doing.
It’s not going to serve you any good past a 3.
Jujimufu: That’s news to me. 3. I would have thought it was like
a 5. I’m not arguing with it.
Hayden: Hey. I was just telling her that my whole life was a 5 on
the pain scale. 24 hours a day. It really took me having to take a
step back and thinking about that stuff a lot more to get to the
point where I’m at now, where I’m pretty much training pain free,
100% of the time.
Stefi: And it was your best training cycle ever.
Hayden: Yeah, totally. Yeah.
Stefi: Then once you’ve done all of that, the best place to start
is isometrics. It’s like the safest type of contraction. Once you
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have an injury, what kind of exercises should you start doing:
isometrics. That’s the answer for all of them. If you have Patellar
tendonitis: isometrics, like a wall sit, for example. Maybe you
have back pain: bird dog, dead bug, side plank, plank.
Jujimufu: In isometric form?
Stefi: Yeah.
Jujimufu: You just, yeah, yeah. Have you done these and found
that they work for you?
Stefi: Absolutely. Yeah, so I mean, they work. We don’t understand
a hundred percent why they work, but we do know that they help
modulate pain because of something called exercise induced
analgesia. Basically, isometrics activate certain receptors in the
muscle that attenuates the pain signal in your brain temporarily.
That’s huge if your back is hurting, and you can do an exercise
and then be pain free for three, four hours. That’s huge. Then
you do them again and you’re pain free for three more hours, and
again and again and again. Those are exercises that you should
be doing frequently, when you’re in that stage. Isometrics, and
then eccentrics, that’s essentially like, the process.
Jujimufu: Nice.
Stefi: And then finally, just finding out what the root cause of
it was. You know, some people might need to go see someone
who’s a specialist in movement and try to see if there’s any
movement corrections that need addressed. For most people at
the highest level, there is no technique or movement correction
they need to do. It was just either a freak accident or just one
of those cases when the load exceeded the capacity. So, not all
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cases need a movement correction, but if it’s a beginner, and
they’re getting injured, and it’s frequently, like, getting injured:
you bet that it’s something mechanical, something in their
movement that’s not right.
Jujimufu: Right. No, I like just the, uh, the technique is just not
right that they’re doing, or if something’s putting them at risk
that they’re doing.
Stefi: I mean, think about it. I’ll give you an example. You have
someone that, um, I don’t know, is leaning to the left in a squat
and even like, it could be only a little bit, what’s that gonna do
after a thousand reps? It’s like having a car that’s out of alignment.
What’s that gonna do to the wheels? One wheel is going to
get more worn out than the others. So, same thing in this case.
You have a beginner lifter, and they keep getting hip pain, or
they keep getting glute pain, back pain, or whatever it is, and
then you look at their squat and they have a shift. You’re going
to have to address the question “Why is a shift happening?”
Okay. Is it limited hip mobility and is there something in the hip
capsule that’s preventing it from going full flexion, full extension,
or internal rotation, or whatever? Is it motor control? Are they
just like, not proficient with a movement? Is it some sort of
muscular imbalance from any muscular asymmetry from one leg
to the other? Or what is the actual root cause of it that’s leading
to the pain? Especially when someone gets injured frequently.
Jujimufu: Yeah. It’s different from just going to see a doctor and
seeing what happened. Like you said, you know….
Stefi: It doesn’t matter what happened, it doesn’t matter what
the name of the injury is! What are the steps that you’re going
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to take, (the ones that I just addressed), and why did it happen
in the first place? Those are the two questions that you should
ask someone, or yourself. Not “What it is,” who cares what it is!
What name you want to give it... I bet you go to five different
people and you get five different answers. Or do you think an
MRI is specific enough? Well, it’s not. Like, there’s this study
I just read where they took the same person to… how many
different MRIs? It was something ridiculous, like eight different
MRI places and the sensitivity was like 30%, which is not good.
Hayden: What does that mean. Explain that.
Stefi: It means that the accuracy at which they were able to
identify pathology in the MRI wasn’t accurate at all.
Stefi: It was only 30% accurate. And it’s the same case when
you go to a healthcare professional, you might get five different
diagnoses, especially with musculoskeletal injuries. Like, we’re
not identifying brain tumors, you know? It’s not black and white.
It’s actually very gray. So it has to do with what the PT, Physio,
or Chiro has seen in the past, and what they believe is true, what
their experience with athletes is. It doesn’t have anything to
do at that point with what the injury actually is. And it doesn’t
matter anyway.
Jujimufu: Okay. Well, there’s one reason why you should go to a
doctor. To get painkillers.
Stefi: Oh my gosh.
Jujimufu: Hahahahaha!
Jujimufu: That was awesome. Thank you so much, Stefi!
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CONNECT WITH ME
I hope you enjoyed this book! One key motivation I had in writing
this book was to gift myself a reminder when I experience my
own setbacks. This book is a great gift for anyone in your life
who has recently experienced a training setback or otherwise.
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