Tuesday, August 12, 2014

When Life Gives You Lemons...

Today I took another step backwards towards being able to squat heavy again. I strained my hip flexor again, this time on my right side instead of my left like it has been in the past. Let's take a look back at my hip history just these past 6 months. In March I strained my hip the first time and really couldn't squat at all, even unweighted, for a good 2 months. I then started squatting again and was feeling good, and then around the middle of June I reinjured it. Then about a week after I started squatting again (today) I hurt my right side, except today I did it stretching, and I wasn't even stretching my hip (I'm not really sure what actually happened). Yes this is incredibly frustrating, and I really am trying to rehab my hip and not get injured, but somehow I keep getting hurt. Maybe I'm just not meant to squat, who knows.

I've been at camp this summer and since I couldn't squat at all, and I couldn't snatch or clean because there weren't any bumpers, so naturally I stuck to deadlifting and overhead presses as my main strength exercises. Naturally my luck would kick in with my shoulders, and one night when I was having a pool party with my campers, we were "fighting" in the pool and one of my kids pulled on my left arm (my left shoulder has been the one that has had issues in the past) in some strange way where I felt a pop. I ended up getting it checked out and there wasn't any structural damage done, but I have yet to feel comfortable doing any hard work with it.

Now what's with the title, "When Life Gives You Lemons..."? Well, in this case, life has given me the ability, or really forced me, to work on one big thing right now. I can't squat, I can't press, so naturally I need to get really good at deadlifting. Since I was going to be at camp, I needed a program that wasn't going to require a lot of time because I don't have any time, so I started a Wendler 5/3/1 cycle 2 weeks before camp started. I'm now on my 3rd cycle, and next week, I'll be maxing out on 95% of what my actual 1RM was when I started all of this. I'm pretty excited because I'm finally putting in time to get really good (it's all relative to me) at something because I have to.

This is all meant for people to look at injuries differently. Yes, injuries suck. They don't let you work on different skills or lifts that you may want to, but unless you have something really major wrong, you are still able to work on some things. A buddy of mine got a really bad strain to his calf and can't do much lower body work now. Now he is getting really good at gymnastics work because that's about all he can do.

Injuries should not be something that bring you down and make you hate training. Injuries should be something force you to work on things that you're now able to only work on, and most likely you were neglecting beforehand, and get a lot better at them. Don't let injuries be a reason to be lazy, use the "lemons" that you've been given to make some awesome "lemonade" and get really good!