Have you ever met someone who has never been injured? My guess is no. I certainly can’t think of anyone I know who has never been injured in some way, whether it be from some traumatic event or a chronic, insidious, nagging issue that develops over time. There is a lot of information available about keeping us healthy and injury-free, so much so that you probably couldn’t read it all even if you wanted to. So, if there are so many ideas abounding, why do none of us seem to be immune? Is it really possible to prevent injury?
I don’t know that it is possible to completely prevent injury simply because the amount and complexity of the variables involved are too great for us to comprehend. However, we can reduce the risk by considering a few simple undeniable truths. Here are a few to keep in mind:
1. Tissue Preparation - The body has been gifted with an amazing ability to adapt to stress, including the physical stress of exercise and movement in general. For example, look at the calluses on your feet and hands. Because of this potential, the body is capable of performing remarkable feats and withstanding amazing loads, but only if the tissues have had enough time to adapt and develop enough resiliency necessary for those tasks. You can reduce your risk of injury by progressively increasing tissue stress over an extended period of time to build resiliency and capacity. If your capacity is greater than the loads you experience, then things don’t break.
2. Stress Variability - In accommodating to stress as described above, it is important to maintain the Goldilocks principle: not too much and not too little, but just the right amount. Variability allows us to do this in a logical way. Repeated stress in the same manner over and over again will break tissues sooner than if the tissue is loaded at different rates, with different loads, in different directions, etc. Not only that, but variability in your training allows your nervous system to learn how to control your different body segments in many different situations, which is the norm in real life.
3. Teamwork - When you move, your brain coordinates all of the available body segments according to the task or the goal of the movement, whether that is walking, squatting, etc. It does this through the path of least resistance. So, if your body can’t get the motion needed from a certain joint, it will simply ask for that motion from some other joint in order to accomplish the task. This joint that takes on more load and motion will often wear out quicker and suffer injury first because it is being forced to dissipate a greater proportion of the stress. If this pattern continues for a long time or is adopted during an extreme load, injury is likely.
4. Humility - The body is capable of amazing feats, and competition can be a powerful psychological driver to elicit these feats. However, these drivers can be strong enough to cause us to attempt things that we don’t have the prerequisite mobility and/or stability to tolerate, and this can lead to injury as well. So, while aiming high is very valuable for successful gains, it is also crucial to stay humble and patient enough that you make these gains at a logical rate and don’t attempt things that are way above your functional threshold.
5. Know Thyself - Pain is an unpleasant sensation produced by your brain in response to a perceived threat to the system. It is not just there to annoy you for no reason. Instead, it is vital to your survival. In fact, some folks who have a rare disorder in which they have no pain sensation at all often die relatively young. So, when you experience pain, it is important to listen to it and respect it the first time; it’s trying to help you stay successful for the long run. Ignoring it or adopting the “no pain, no gain” philosophy will often times result in injury as we continue to stress some tissue that our body is trying to tell us is already being overstressed beyond its capacity.
Getting injured and feeling pain is part of being human. Some things in life are outside of our control. So, when thinking about injury prevention, it would be wise to think in the terms of building comprehensive capacity and resiliency in your body; the ability to withstand as many different forms of stress as possible, both those that are foreseen and those that are unforeseen. We try to cultivate this in our programming here at Rogue River CrossFit. However, many of us don't get enough direction in dedicating attention to those factors that leave us at undue risk. Thus, we are planning to offer a Functional Mobility Fixes class in the near future that will give you a chance to learn how to assess for chinks in your armour and more importantly how to start addressing them on your own.
- Coach Mike