This article will provide a scientific evaluation of three frequently-implemented recovery strategies: anti-inflammatory interventions (NSAID/ice baths), foam rolling, and nutrition timing.

If life is a juggling act, some balls are rubber and some are glass. You can get another job, buy a new car, or pay someone to fix your house, but if you drop the ball with your family, it is broken forever.

You can’t just throw in extra workouts or recovery protocols and expect to get the most out of them. Like everything else in training, they need to be programmed strategically and used at the right times.

The body is limited but the mind is unbelievably more powerful. With positive mental imagery, you can take successful rep after successful rep with a weight you have never even touched.

When recovering from a recent hamstring tear, I started using a simple practice that can not only make training more intense, productive, and satisfying, but can also help you handle anything in training — including injury.

The continuous feedback of the wall can provide the athlete with a sense of position, tension, and compensation, resulting in improved performance and benefit of the exercises.

How do people begin to decipher what constitutes good injury rehabilitation or pre-habilitation? In this article, I’m going to describe in detail many different factors that will help you sniff out the bullshit.

Getting stuck in the routine of a disrupted sleep-wake cycle can turn a top-tier athlete into a complete mess. Understanding circadian rhythms is the first step to avoiding this.

When looking at how to continue to train through overuse injuries, there are five main regressions and changes I have found able to lead to pain-free movement in the squat.

In order to best manage the time available to devote to recovery, it is essential to devise supplemental recovery methods that best target each athlete’s personal needs.

Only five days out from an important meet, I don’t have much time to fix the issues I’m having. For this reason I’m approaching the idea of a pre-meet deload a little differently.

Let’s take a quick look at some simple biomechanics, and then we will break down the squat so we can rebuild it with an emphasis on generating torque.

Now that we have a clear understanding of what posture is and why it is important, we can begin developing a plan to improve it.

In part two of this series, the topic is the big three for recovery, which allows athletes to experience better performance, resistance to injury, and longevity in their sport.

As a lifter, and likely someone that sits at a desk a lot, the odds are you spend a lot of time slouching, with tight hip flexors, pecs and biceps, fueling the fire of kyphosis, lordosis, and medial humeral rotation.

Worried that too much cardio could hinder your muscle growth? Performed the right way, at the right time, low-intensity aerobic activity can actually improve muscle hypertrophy.

Seven years ago while benching 500 pounds, I experienced a partial pec tear to the muscle belly near the attachment to the pec tendon. These are the techniques I used to recover and the exercises I perform to safeguard my pec from ever tearing again.

Surgery isn’t magic but sometimes it is the best option if you’re willing to take the time to recover and undergo proper rehabilitation. Here’s my story of osteoarthritis at 29 years old.

Understanding the role of recovery is the first step to improving your health, longevity, and performance as a strength athlete. Think of it like this: your training is the sledgehammer and your recovery is the raw materials and blueprints for improvement.

This article will give a thorough understanding of the similarities and differences between modalities, which modality is best for certain injuries, how they are best used in your training, and what their overall purpose is.

The shoulder is a complex joint but keeping it healthy can be simple. Many issues can be fixed or greatly improved with certain exercises and stretching.

The first article of this series covered quick, effective drills to use prior to training that will improve your lower body performance. Now let’s look at the upper body and address the three most common dysfunction in strength athletes.

There are several things to understand when putting together a rehabilitation protocol, but if you create the right plan and stick to it, you’ll be recovered in no time.

There are four joints that make up the shoulder and 12 muscles that act on the scapula. These simple range of motion screens can help you identify issues and develop a plan to train for correcting them.

Looking at lats, thoracic mobility, and the ribcage during an overhead exercise can tell you a lot about a person’s pattern, position, and movement quality.

If shoulder pain is holding you back when pressing overhead, the infraspinatus and AC joint are two likely culprits you should examine.

I’ve used these items before training as a way to warm up and loosen muscle fiber, and I’ve used them after training as a form of relaxation and recovery. In every case, they’re improving the way I feel and lift.

If you’ve pushed your exercise intensity too far and crossed through the “training redline” into the zones of injury severity, it’s going to take some time to heal. These are several techniques to help you understand the extent of your injury and rehabilitation process.

What mobility or stability drills should I do? How much should I do of them? Which days do I do them on? Here’s what to do, when to do them, how to do them, and how long you should do them.

There are four common muscle injury patterns from the barbell bench press or “pushing forward.” The subscapularis strain is the most common, but there are ways to test for it and treat it.

If you anticipate an extended period of time off, there are lots of things you can do right to avoid common mistakes. Your goal should be to come back stronger and tremendously benefit from time away from heavy weight.

I decided I was going to use this setback as a gift, to become better than I was yesterday. To become strong, pain-free, and resilient.

The half-kneeling y-raise is great at showing athletes correct scapulo-humeral rhythm without the common compensations of the over-dominant accessory muscles of the neck and back. To do it, follow the rules of manual resistance.

Where you lack motion or motor control, your body will pass down the chain to the next moving part that can buy you an extra bit to help you get into position. This is dysfunction.

I recently realized I’ve been looking at my back injury the wrong way all along. I needed to simplify the way I was thinking about it.

The latest and greatest from Dr. Ken Kinakin includes specific muscle tests for upper and lower body exercises to determine if the muscles are functional and capable of handling the stress of weight.

One, two, three, or even four Screamin’ Daves. If you aren’t sure which liniment is for you, use this guide to direct you to the perfect product.

The benefits of improved sleep are just as real as the consequences of deprivation. Follow these simple rules for sleep and watch your recovery—and your progress—skyrocket.

If you Google “hip pain at the bottom of the squat,” you’re going to be left more than a little confused about what the cause might be and what you should do. Let’s sort through all of the information and advice.

If you’re forced to take time away from the gym, where should your focus be? Maintaining strength? Maintaining size? Getting healthy?

Every medical professional gauges how much slack on the leash they can give you without negative effects because everyone’s threshold is a little different. What’s Dave’s? And why?

You can control the physical demands placed on your body in the gym, but you can’t always control what happens outside of it. How can you ensure you’re recovered and in an optimal state once its time to train?

Two weeks after a tear in my quad, I was squatting 860 pounds again. This is how.

It really seems like most people don’t care about corrective exercises and prehab until chronic injury and age rear their ugly heads. Enter: my current life situation and the solution.

Your numbers will be subject to so many external variables, but your character is forged by intentionality.

The purpose of this tool is to identify problems and compensations in an individual’s movement patterns and to restore neurological balance to allow the body to perform the way it naturally should.

With all the buzz going on about body tempering, a lot of questions come up about why it works or what makes it different than other types of treatments. Here’s the answer.

In these six videos, Dani identifies and helps resolve Casey’s hip issues while squatting. How can Casey’s powerlifting setback help you?

If you try to ignore an injury, you’re going to end up in one of two places: with compensated strength or accumulated injury. Is continuing to train, but simply using lighter weights, the answer?

Is it a bad decision to stop performing lifts that cause an axial load on the spine when the back is injured?

If you’ve addressed pelvis position but your mobility, mechanics, or pain aren’t changing, consider that your neurological reference center may need to shift. Shift it to your heels.

In today’s article, I’m going to show you how flat feet can harm you during your squat, and more importantly, give you exercises to fix it.

We experience breaks, tears, sprains, joint replacements, and other sundry surgeries. We could stop, but we don’t. We overcome, persevere, and come back stronger.

Training was so important to me. It covered my insecurity and kept me distracted from the ugliness that was brewing underneath.

This is my favorite part of the whole series — you get to see how all of this comes together and how it can help YOU as a lifter.

We’ve worked on several components separately but this exercise brings them together: first getting into the left hip, then finding neutral, and then breathing and bracing while in this proper position.

This exercise will challenge strength and stability in all three planes of motion with various subconscious lessons.

We pulled him into his left hip in the previous exercise, while this correction is designed to help drive him “off” his right hip.

Having mobility issues? While direct work in the traditional sense will certainly help, so will continuing to train, if you plan correctly.