Though I have been fortunate to not have very many serious injuries over the 37 years I have been training, it is still frustrating when smaller injuries creep up and pull training time while waiting for them to recovery/heal.
This last year has been tough. I have only managed about 3 months of quad training in the last 9 months due to my hip injury (partial rupture of the glute medius) and now tendonitis and a sprained LCL. The “mental challenge” is the fact that I can’t stand doing something halfway. I’m an all or none kind of guy. Training everything but quads is not something that sits well with me.
The above being stated, I have continued to push through and train hamstrings and calves until the LCL issue “popped” up about 3 weeks ago. I tried to still train calves and hamstrings and it was clear this was a bad idea. I now am doing no lower body training, at all, while waiting for this minor injury to heal. It will likely cost me another 4 weeks of leg training before I can start training them light again and breaking back into intense training.
The other challenge is that daily tasks are difficult because the knee is easily irritated. Training clients one-on-one is a challenge because I am on my feet all day, loading plates, etc. My own upper body is a challenge because even something as seemingly innocuous as dumbbell presses are difficult on the knee due to having to get the heavy dumbbells off of the rack and then sit down on a bench with them in my lap. This one exercise irritated my knee for 2 full days.
I have had to change my upper body training to accommodate the knee issue by not using exercises that irritate the knee – a lot of machines, barbell exercises, and exercises that don’t require a lot of set up. This may seem like no big deal but going back to the “all or none” issue, I just hate being forced (by the injury) to change my training to what might be less productive just because I have to get this injury healed as quickly as possible.
Another mental component of these injuries is having to be public about them. I feel like every time I post about an injury, people think it’s because I’m old. Even if people in the industry don’t do that, my friends that don’t train, do. I can’t stand comments like, “well, what do you expect, you are over 50 years old now, maybe you should not train so heavy or so hard.” Explaining to them that it isn’t about my age is not something they are going to believe because they are old and sedentary and even having sex with their spouse can cause soreness or they could throw a hip out. They won’t understand that I’m not like them. Though we are the same age, we aren’t the same physical age.
I now am wearing a knee sleeve while I train upper body and while I train clients. This is to provide more support to the knee while on my feet all day. This has already begun to help and has minimized the irritation/inflammation. I feel that if I was to just stay in bed for a week, it would likely be recovered very quickly. However, that is never going to happen so I just have to be very careful with it and make sure that I don’t tweak it doing something stupid. As we all know, the better an injury starts to feel, the more likely we are to forget it’s an injury and we do something stupid. I am working hard to remind myself that even when it feels better, that it isn’t fully recuperated, yet.
If all goes well, it should only take 4 weeks and I can start training legs light again. I’m counting the days.
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