Several years ago, I wrote an article for elitefts™ titled “Train Through Pain.” The article rehashed a back injury I’d experienced and how I dealt with it. It also ended up getting posted on Bodybuilding.com. However, elitefts™ has a more hard-nosed audience than Bodybuilding.com. Of this, there isn't any doubt. While I didn’t get any feedback on elitefts™ (I don’t think elitefts™ had a feedback medium at the time), within 48 hours I had an inbox full of straight hate mail from the posting on Bodybuilding.com.
Orthopedics, young guys, old guys, hurt guys, guys who had heard about a guy getting hurt, guys who had been hurt by what I wrote, and one girl—they all said that what I’d produced was irresponsible if not downright dangerous. My response was that the article was more of a motivational effort, a different approach to dealing with training around injuries. At the core, I didn’t really buy into this. I just wanted to smother the fires a bit and not be assassinated by a dude who hurt his back deadlifting. Seriously, I’m sure modern writers of the internet era are more than used to this kind of thing, but I had no idea the amount of pissed off people that were out there just waiting for someone to decapitate.
The truth was I’d never experienced a serious injury. I weighed 245 pounds. I had totaled 1500 pounds raw. I was 26 years old. Any injury I’d sustained went away in like ten days or miraculously healed after a pint of Jack. I trained with strong guys at a great gym. I went on lifting and rolling right through the tweaks and the strains. When my shoulder started hurting, I kept the weights heavy. I trained five to six times a week. If I lifted in the morning and things didn’t go well, I’d come back that afternoon and lift again. In hindsight, somewhere deep down I knew where this was going. It’s so easy to know what lies at the end of this path.
The problem is that when you’re the one walking it, you wear an irremovable pair of blinders. Do you think that dude who cheated on his wife and then lost both her and the kids in a divorce thought that’s where he’d end up one day? Think that’s what he set out to do that morning? Of course not. But I bet you saw it coming. A series of decisions brought him to that point, and you probably watched him make a bunch of ‘em to get there. We all know where certain sequences of decisions lead, especially when it comes to the decisions and actions taken by others. But it's way harder to apply this type of clarity to our own paths in life.
It's even harder when that path is something as seemingly harmless as lifting weights. Who’s gonna pull you aside and be like, “Hey buddy, you really need to lay off those weights. You know those things’ll ruin your life?” It isn't like abusing a power rack carries the same risk of say blowing mountains of coke every day for years on end. But the principle itself remains true regardless of the application. The end result just looks a little different.
My training pedal remained punched to the floor with the windshield spray painted black. My shoulder passed the point of hurting. I got to where I couldn’t lift my arm up to drive a car. I kept lifting. I did incline benches instead of flat. When I couldn’t incline, I did strict standing presses. Finally, when I couldn’t military press a 45-lb bar, I went to the orthopedic for an MRI. Two of the four tendons that made up my rotator cuff were hanging by a thread. I was all of 28 years old. I never played baseball, and I’d never thrown anything heavier than a bitchin’ kegger in my entire life.
I passed on the surgical option and performed my own version of rehabilitation with Indian club swings and foam roller stretches. I started conditioning just because I couldn’t do anything else. Jim Wendler and 5/3/1 had obtained cult status about this time, so I bought the book and read. I could still squat and deadlift with minimal pain, but I even had to be careful with those. Training through pain in my situation would have led to a left arm amputation the way I was going. The blinders were at last removed now that I had pretty much wrapped the car around a telephone pole.
I'm now almost a year removed from the MRI and diagnosis. The guys I trained with have moved on. The gym I went to closed down. I used to have knee and back pain and a healthy dose of tendonitis in both elbows. I used to box squat with chains, chainsaws, bands, kettlebells, cowbells, bellboys, and any other crap we could find to hang from the bar. I used to do nothing but rack pulls to train my deadlift. I wore knee wraps, wrist wraps, lifting straps, and a belt to do a dumbbell row.
My training has since found its rightful path. I squat with knee sleeves and nothing else. I deadlift and military press with a belt. I use boxes to put stuff in. Bands are music groups that write and perform songs. Supplements and nitrous oxide amino inhibitors stopped affecting my strength level when I quit thinking they affected my strength level. I throw on wrist wraps for my last set of incline bench presses. Chains are used to pull trucks out of the mud. I threw my lifting straps in the trash. I eat when I get hungry. I train at a big stupid commercial gym in Atlanta and I don’t care. I weigh 220 pounds. I just turned 30 and I have a kid on the way. I don’t have lifting partners, spotters, heavy metal music to lift to, or anything remotely close to a motivating training environment.
I lift four days a week, three, if life requires it. It's now simply the bar and me with a heavy dose of focus. I don’t bench or squat near what I used to, but that gap is closing by the week. I’m on track to deadlift 600 pounds by the end of July. I run up and down the hill in my neighborhood twice a week. I military press the same weight I did when I weighed 245 and benched 405 pounds and will surpass this in the next thirty days.
You must constantly learn and adapt. Sometimes you're smart enough to do this on your own. More often though life forces your hand. Remove the blinders and take a good hard look at the path you travel. As surely as our time on this planet is finite, so too will your path take you to its eventual destination. In the weeks following my diagnosis, I was borderline depressed. Training was and still is a very important part of my life. The idea that it might come to an end was extremely tough to deal with.
In hindsight, that rotator cuff was a blessing in the truest sense. Not only did it allow me the opportunity to reprioritize what really matters in life, but it also put me on a path of patience and perseverance. Wendler's 5/3/1 requires both and one’s success using the program requires nothing less. If you push too hard, it will push you right back down. The program isn't about benching 500 lbs in eight weeks. It's designed to blueprint your training for an entire lifetime. Be patient. Work hard. Leave your ego at home when necessary and your path toward raw strength will unfold in a straight line. Don’t lose a year or more going ninety miles an hour straight toward a brick wall.