Episode #131 3 red flags keeping you stuck post injury

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Transcript

0:36

Hello. Hello. Welcome back to the pod, and today's episode is going to very nicely follow up last week's Monday episode, and I wanna be talking about three red flags that might be in your post-injury programming that's keeping you stuck. All right. Okay, and I'm gonna talk about red flags. You need to look for whether you are making up your own workouts after your injury, getting back into it, whether you're following programming, whether you're just modifying the shit outta stuff, whether you're doing group class you know, I, I bet if you went to physical therapy, they gave you a sheet of exercises and were like, oh, just keep doing these. So it's a little more complex than that. So I'm going to get into it. You're gonna have some tangible takeaways. So red flag number one is going to be you're doing random rehab drills with no clear goal. So going off of, okay, you graduated physical therapy, they give you a sheet of exercises. And they're like, do this for homework three times a week, or, you know, whatever they told you. But like, if there's no progression after that then they're kind of pointless because if they're way too easy and not progressed enough you're gonna start making progress. So most common thing things that, most common things that I see are still doing body weight movements. Things like banded clamshells, very light banded things. Super basic core exercises, super basic knee exercises. You know, like if you're still doing those things for like six months after your physical therapy or your injury or whatever, like, that's not hard enough, right? Like that needs to be progressed. Similarly, your quote unquote, continued rehab should look like the training you're trying to get back to. Right? So I bet before your injury, you had a way of working out that you really liked, whether that was group class through regular strength training, barbell, you know, whatever that is for you, the training you're trying to get back to your rehab. And things to cont continue progressing after your injury. Like it should look similar. There should be an a bridge, a clear bridge where you're like, oh, I see how this specific movement is gonna get me back to doing this. I see how these single leg step up are getting me back to barbell, back squatting, right? So. There should be a clear bridge in progression. It shouldn't just be like, oh, we're going from bandit clamshells back on the barbell baby, right? Like, it should not, you know, you need more progression, right? Like there's a time and a place for body weight exercises for bandit clamshells, for those like lower level PT exercise. There's time and place for them, but all, they're not meant to be forever. You're not meant to be doing those same things forever. It has to progress. So red flag number two, you are avoiding movements instead of reintroducing them, you're avoiding back squats, you're avoiding deadlift, you're avoiding running, you're avoiding lunges out of fear or out of pain. So you're just skipping it all together. You don't know how to regress it to the right stimulus. Like these are basically. Your, or maybe you're doing a bottle of back squat, but you are doing it to a quarter depth on plates. Heels elevated, like no. Right? Like constant, constant modifications with no reintegration strategy. So like our, that's a no go, right? Like you should not just be modifying forever when you do modify something, there should be a clear. Like it should be clear that you're trying to get back to doing X, Y, z. Right? Example, let's take pulling dead lifts from the floor. For an example, you can regress back to doing like a kettlebell RDL, right? There's a clear bridge between like, oh, I'm still hinging. I'm doing less range of motion. I'm going lighter. You know, but it is preparing you. To get back to Barb about deadlifting, right? That is how it should be. You shouldn't just be, you know, ripping dead lifts from the floor anyways at like a barely any weight. You, you know, like that's not helping you. So this avoidance that tends to happen it leads to further compensation and more problems. I see this most often. With going right back to bilateral movements, so two legged movements, and you're not doing any single leg movements, that's backwards. You need to be doing single leg, and then you're progressing to bilateral, because guess what? When you're using two legs, when you're using two arms, it is so easy to hide compensations and imbalances because you're using your two limbs. Versus when you're doing single leg, single arm unilateral stuff, there is nowhere to hide if you have a compensation. So this is why I love unilateral movements so much is because there is nowhere to hide when it comes to compensation. And that's really important. If you are coming off of an injury or you are in dealing with nagging pain, that means you're compensating somewhere. Right? And what we wanna avoid is like. You continuing to do to compensate in certain movements and then that leads to pain in another spot elsewhere. Right? Especially if you have something like knee pain. Guess what? If you have knee pain and you're constantly compensating, you also might develop back pain or hip pain or even foot pain. So it's never just like. One thing, right? Our body all works together. It's all connected. So if there are compensations somewhere that are happening, you might develop pain in another place and you might be like, oh, that's random, but no, it's not. It's all connected. So and then red flag number three is going to be defining success only as pain free. So there are many markers to success, and your training is not always going to be pain-free, especially if you are working through an injury. What I teach my clients is learning about the red flags and it comes to pain and like appropriate discomfort, thresholds that it's okay to keep going, right? So if we're looking at a scale of one to 10, one being I'm not feeling anything, 10 being I need to go to the hospital. It is okay to have discomfort and pain from a one to four on that scale. And that's even normal and expected when you're working through an injury. So that's okay if it's like a dull pain, just kind of there, that's fine. If it's a sharp shooting pain and you can point to exactly where it hurts, that is more of a red flag and you're like, okay, I should stop this. Right. And. If you are dealing with that dull pain though, it's like a six though. A six out of 10. Okay. Where can we back off range of motion or weight or tempo or something to get that threshold back down to a four? And then we keep training through that. So that's a big thing that I teach my clients when it comes to pain because a lot of people think that like. Oh, I'm feeling pain. I should stop. That means I shouldn't do this movement. That means I should not do this. And that's not always the case. It's much more nuanced than that, especially if we're coming back through an in from an injury. And yeah. So other markers of success when it comes to working through an injury is going to be increased. Confidence in a movement, increased movement, quality you know, obviously going up in weight, more range of motion. Like those are probably the biggest ones. It's not always just like being a hundred percent pain free, right? So there are so many other pieces to the puzzle when it comes to success when we're working through an injury. And, yeah. So that is all I've got for you guys today. I hope this was helpful. Hope you gave you some tangible takeaways. And if you're listening to this and you're like, man, I really want to start rebuilding my strength the right way after an injury, you just feel lost in the gym. You don't feel confident and you want my opinion on. What your next step should be. I offer free injury audits, which is basically where you fill out a short questionnaire and I record a video, create a document, and I give you my thoughts on what could potentially be going on and what your next step should be. To move the needle in the right direction. So if you're somebody that's been like creeping on my stuff, but you're not ready to get a full assessment from me, but you do want my opinion free injury audit, it's free. I'll give you my opinion, I'll give you some of my time and I'll give you yeah, my thoughts, tangible takeaways. Anyways, I'll put the link for that in the show notes, but I appreciate you listening and talk to you in the next episode.