About six months ago, I injured my knees and shoulder weight lifting. These weren’t major injuries – I could still walk, and I had most of my range of motion for my shoulder, but this wasn’t the first time I’ve had similar injuries, and things are not yet normal today.
Quickly summarized, I went from a lull in my workout to Chad Waterbury’s Harbinger Hypertrophy, and in a few months hit my all-time peak for certain exercises. I knew that low-reps had caused me to hurt myself in the past, but my ego was bubbled and I figured I was in good enough shape for that not to happen again. I ended up hurting my knees squatting and my shoulder doing heavy weight on my incline bench press. I figured that I could try to work around these injuries and continued doing other shoulder work like one-arm military presses, pull-ups, and similar lifts, but it just worsened things.
If you want to read the whole story I wrote an article here:
I consulted an orthopedist five months later (which I should have done in the beginning) and he said that I have minor patellar tendinitis and a stiff shoulder. These are fortunately minor, but nonetheless aggravating. He gave me a number of stretches which helped significantly, but I’ve reached a point where they are no longer necessary and not entirely effective. Feling almost normal, I started lifting again four weeks ago, but I can only do very light weight and in the past week I’ve already tweaked my shoulder again.
My question to you guys is this: How do you recover from these kinds of injuries? I don’t have a long athletic history outside of my time weight lifting in college, nor do I have a trainer so I don’t know how to treat and recuperate my joints back to normal. How long do you normally wait from the time of a minor injury until you lift again? Are there exercises I should perform or avoid to keep my weak areas from further harm? Can you please point me to some articles that may be of assistance?
You can see my current list of exercises here (the daily split is different now, though):
I’ll be interested in the shoulder answer to this question since I am just coming back from tweaking my right shoulder a week ago. Since then I’ve dropped all shoulder lifting(all pressing) and just did deadlifts/front squats to keep lifting. Yesterday was the first day I actually did anything for my shoulder with weights(pink ones at that) and although it didn’t really hurt my tweaked shoulder got tired almost immediately.
I plan on doing light/no weigh lifting with it like what’s described in the shoulder savers articles until I rebuild enough strength to get back to normal lifting again. What else can you do? It’s not like you have a lot of options once your hurt.
Well one thing I did that was wrong was that I rested TOO much. Your joints need movement and if you don’t keep moving and stretching they tighten up and get more injury prone. But that’s only part of the answer… what to do after you’ve recently tweaked is something I really need to know.
I was thinking about this on the car ride home… my biggest flaw and bad tendency is to either over-work myself or give up when injury occurs. I can’t let that happen again – my thought is to lift SUPER light until this thing blows over. Is that a good idea? Would working out 3x a week with light weight still be a good idea when I’m trying to recuperate? Going to the gym is the main thing I look forward to after a long day at work… it would suck unbelievable balls to be injured again.
[quote]maskedbacon wrote:
I was thinking about this on the car ride home… my biggest flaw and bad tendency is to either over-work myself or give up when injury occurs. I can’t let that happen again – my thought is to lift SUPER light until this thing blows over. Is that a good idea? Would working out 3x a week with light weight still be a good idea when I’m trying to recuperate? Going to the gym is the main thing I look forward to after a long day at work… it would suck unbelievable balls to be injured again.[/quote]
I think your getting into the overworking thing again. I work out 2-3 times a week and lift heavy but I do lifts that will try to keep me from loosing too much muscle while avoiding my shoulder issues entirely. I still do rehab stuff for my shoulders and stretch but at this point if anything doesn’t feel good with my shoulder I just don’t do it.
Yeah… tonight was really hard. I got a nice run in but the only exercises I could do were ab exercises, light leg extensions, tricep pull-downs, and two sets of 7-7-7’s with the 20 pound bar (everything else was taken, and I probably shouldn’t do anything heavier anyway).
I hate the feeling of being gimpy and I’m really angry at myself for getting hurt again. I guess time and patience will heal most things, but I’m considering seeing a physical therapist to learn how to get out of this rut.
I’m skipping swimming this week and isolated shoulder stuff, so I hope it pays off