Movement is medicine.

Now I’m not saying that if you have an injury to just keep pushing through, but too often we simply do NOTHING.

Then after some time off, we jump right back into what we were doing and wonder why we end up injured again. Why nothing changed.

And it’s because we never addressed what lead to the injury in the first place. We never addressed postural distortions, compensations and imbalances that lead to overload. We never addressed the mobility restrictions and muscle weakness.

If we want to move and feel better? We need to train our bodies to know how to move well. And that means returning to basics and focusing on that prehab work.

If we want to see a change? We have to make a change.

And simply resting changes nothing.
So if you’re injured what can you do to help prevent future issues and even get to still train?

 

1. Address the rehab work you need. Seeing someone is good if this isn’t just a minor ache or pain. But even with those, you need to include the proper prehab work. Like if your wrists hurt with push ups. Do the mobility work needed so you don’t just have to deal with that annoying pain any time you have floor work. You need to foam roll to relax overactive muscles, stretch to lengthen shortened muscles and mobilize your joints and then activate those underactive muscles so that weaker muscles not meant to handle the load don’t have to. We do this work to establish proper recruitment patterns to help make them automatic during compound, faster paced movements. 

2. And as you address the underlying causes? Modify around the pain. While we don’t want to avoid moves forever if possible, we do often need to work around as we correct the problem.

3. And then we need to REBUILD. We need to retrain those movements with tweaks to help us load the correct muscles. It may be using different cues, or slightly different variations. Or even just adjustments to form. Slow things down and focus first on what you feel working over just mimicking proper form. We want to learn how to control as many movement patterns as possible so we then don’t get injured twisting or turning in everyday life!