Positive Health Online

This is an excerpt from  Rock Solid Resilience – An Evidence-Based Guide to Preventing Injury, Optimizing Strength, and Enhancing Performance by Dean Somerset and Dan Pope

Let’s face it, injuries are terrible. Nothing is worse than getting halfway through your warm-up bench press sets and starting to experience stabbing pain in your shoulder as the weights get heavier and heavier. Injuries keep us from doing what we love, plain and simple. For a weightlifter, having a serious injury is the same as having an identity crisis. Lifting weights isn’t just something we love doing; it is a big part of what drives our sense of self.

Rehabilitation is equally frustrating. It can take weeks, months, and even years to recover from some injuries. Worse yet, time away from training is time when you are most likely getting weaker and smaller, basically the opposite of your goals.

One of the best ways to continue building strength and performance in the long haul is to stay healthy. We need a strategy that allows us to make continual gains over time – that minimizes the risk of injury and respects any sort of nagging pain you might be dealing with.

https://www.human-kinetics.co.uk/9781718224155/rock-solid-resilience/

What Influences Injury Risk in Strength Training

Almost every common training approach, style, or goal-specific outcome starts with the assumption that the individual is healthy, without any injuries or limitations, and isn’t at a higher risk for developing a potential injury. This puts anyone with a cranky shoulder, tender lower back, or wobbly knees at a slight disadvantage, especially as the program ramps up to higher volumes and intensities.

Injured tissues tend to have a lower tolerance for loading and take longer to recover than non-injured tissues. This is a big reason why the biggest determinant of future injury is a previous injury. Injured tissues are just more susceptible and don’t adapt to stress from exercise quite as quickly as uninjured tissue. The trick is to figure out how much stress and volume tissues can handle in a way that develops more of what the individual wants without pushing too hard and having tissues breaking down or increasing the risk of further injuries.

Exercise Technique

In the weightlifting community there is a general notion that improper technique is overall one of the largest contributors to injury. On the flip side of the coin, many in the physical therapy community believe there are probably many safe exercise techniques and the human body can over time adapt to a given training technique. In reality, the answer likely lies somewhere in between. It’s likely that certain techniques minimize risk of injury compared to others. The trouble is that we don’t know the answer to this question based on current evidence.

https://www.human-kinetics.co.uk/9781718224155/rock-solid-resilience/

Figure 1: Overhead press with (a) hyperextended lower back versus (b) neutral back.

Sleep, Stress, and Nutrition

Sleep is an amazing thing. It’s wildly important for our health in general and actually has a pretty tight correlation with pain and injury. Getting adequate sleep is also a predictor of the ability to eliminate chronic pain and a critical part of the rehabilitation process after injury.

Stress is another interesting subject. It is commonly cited as a large risk factor for developing chronic pain, especially (but not limited to) in a work environment. Stress is commonly associated with headaches and pain in the neck, lower back, and shoulder.

Nutrition is also most likely an important factor in both injury prevention and rehabilitation from injury. Diets low in calories, calcium, and vitamin D increase risk of bone stress injury and low bone mineral density in cross-country runners. Adequate dietary protein and carbohydrates are important to combat loss of muscle following injury.

Psychosocial Influences

It may be surprising to learn that your psychology also influences your risk of injury. In a study published in 2021 by Martin et al., the researchers found that perfectionistic concerns, a strong athletic identity, and poor coach–athlete relationship all correlated with a higher risk of injury.

Prior and Current Injury History

Generally speaking, a past history of injury is a fairly good predictor of having a future injury (in the previously injured area or elsewhere). This varies, largely based on the individual and the injury sustained, but the idea is that if you sustained an injury in a given area in the past, you may be more likely to experience a similar injury or pain in the same area.

For example, if you’ve injured your shoulder in the past during bench press, then in the future your shoulder may be more likely to start getting painful and irritated again when ramping up bench press volume or intensity.