How to Deal with Injuries

Good afternoon everybody. This is Ron, Lone Star Barbell Club. I want to take a minute real quick before I start my own training this afternoon to go over injuries, and how to deal with them. This is a subject near and dear to my heart. I’ve had my fair share of those. Dealing with one right now that has caused me to make a little adjustment to what I’m going to do today, and I just want to let you know that’s not the end of the world. There was a time in my training journey that having to deviate at all would have either meant complete failure, or I just wouldn’t have done it. I’d have gone through it anyway, I did that more times than I can count, and the results were never good ones.

So if you’re forced through time constraints, injuries, things like that, to make adjustments to your training, don’t be afraid to do that. Don’t be afraid to substitute things out if you need to. We’re looking at a cumulative effect over weeks and months, years, decades, as you continue on in this so don’t be afraid of that. Don’t feel like you’re failing if you have to do that. There’s one thing to be skittish or afraid of pushing yourself to the point where you have pain. That’s not the same thing as I’m talking about. If you have a legitimate, actual injury, for my injury, for example, for me today, my low back feels like it’s been hit by a 20 pound sledgehammer over and over. So I’m just going to take it easy on it.

In the old days, I would have just gone ahead and pulled anyway and just let the cards fall where they may, and they usually fell on the wrong side. So a little word of wisdom from someone who’s been doing this for more than three decades. It’s a cumulative effect. It’s a long-term journey. So don’t be afraid to reevaluate, take a step back if you need to, work around the injured area, learn how to train the body part in question without using a specific exercise that either causes the problem or exacerbates the problem and you will thank me later. You’ll thank yourself later because your training life, the years of your training life are not unlike the years of your actual life, you only have so many times you can push yourself to that point and be stupid until your body’s just going to say no more.

So learn to be smart. If you’re an older lifter, it’s never too late to learn to be smart. I’m learning more and more every day. So just a little thought on injuries and injury maintenance. Prevention is a whole other story, but every now and then, especially when you’re pushing yourself, you’re pushing the limits of what you can do, you’re going to experience times when your body rebels against you a little bit, and that’s not a signal to quit, certainly not a signal to quit, but it’s also not a signal to just say, “Forget it and I’m going to go ahead and do it anyway.” So I hope that helps somebody out there today. Keep working hard, keep fighting for it, head over to Lone Star Barbell, check out, we’ve got a lot of new merch over there and it’s all awesome if I do say so myself. You guys have a great day.