Training with Injuries

With intense training, you are bound to get some bumps and bruises on the road to increasing your fitness. A little soreness isn’t a bad thing at all and probably means you’re actually working pretty hard. Injuries on the other hand are not a good thing at all because they can really derail your progress, plus they are just incredibly annoying. However, there are certain ways in which you can train through and around your injuries.

First thing you have to do is listen to your doctor (assuming you’ve seen one). If your doctor says not to do something, don’t do it. Making the injury worse is not worth whatever progress you might see, and if you’re pushing through an injury, you’re probably not going to be getting any progress anyway. For example, a month ago I noticed some pain in my foot, went to a doctor, and found out I had a stress fracture in my 2nd metatarsal in my left foot. He told me no jumping and no running. That means I had to stop everything that had that. He then recommended I lay off doing most everything else. Now in general I wouldn’t recommend what I did, but in my mind because he didn’t explicitly say not to do other movements, I went along doing just about everything else as far as pain would allow. In general though, I would listen to your doctor’s orders AND recommendations. I may be fine now, but it is always possible that the things I was doing could have just made things worse.

If you have something that is not an injury like a fracture where you can still do things, but it hurts to do so or you can’t go through the full range of motion, then you can still workout, but modify things to not strain the injury, and then do lots of mobility work to help with the issue. Again, to use myself as an example. After doing my Level 1, I woke up the next day with a pretty bad strain in my left hip flexors. It was most likely a result of doing lots of squats the 5 days prior in various capacities. As such though, I can’t really squat right now and because of that I now have to modify workouts that have squatting or any other large amounts of hip flexion to not include it. On days where there are movements such as thrusters, I would just do push presses. Plus before and after workouts, I do a lot of mashing of my hips, release of my psoas, and trying to create slack in my quads. In general, if you have something that more just gets in the way, but isn’t an extreme injury, you can find things to work around it. I would definitely recommend talking to a coach though because they know more than you do, that’s why they are there.

Having injuries sucks, but they don’t have to be the end of the world for your training. It is possible to work around them and still see progress, but you want to do it conservatively and intelligently so you don’t make the injury even worse.