How to Deal with Injury in the Gym

Shoulder is one of the most common injuries in the gym

Try as hard as you might, but eventually in your fitness journey you will come across some physical injury. No matter how good your form is, how well you regulate your training, do deload weeks, keep nutrition in line, get massages, proper warm up and stretching - You will eventually get hurt. It might not even be in the gym! Maybe you had a wild weekend, slept funny or twisted your ankle on a casual walk. Unless you wrap yourself in bubble wrap and train with such low effort and intensity that you won't even progress, you'll eventually tweak something. So let's talk about how to approach injury management and prevention and what to do when it happens to you!

Setting up an Olympic bar for a lift

Let's start with what we can control - proper technique and warm up. It is important to spend the early days of your fitness journey mastering your technique. The best way to learn is hiring a competent coach (Hi!), the next best thing you can do is study. Lifting weights effectively is a skill and like any other skill takes time and practice to master. I recommend studying video tutorials from various bodybuilders, fitness influencers and lifters on a site like YouTube to learn your fundamental lifts (Channels like RP Strength, Jeff Nippard and even Athlean X are a great start). You can even do this in tandem with your coach! The faster you learn the basics, the faster the results will come but also this vastly reduces your chance of getting hurt as you get stronger. Higher weights = higher injury risk.

Now let's talk about warm up. Many people like to stretch before lifting. STRETCH AFTER. Why? Stretching can reduce overall power in the muscle and create microtears that can weaken the muscle structure under load. These tears are good for rebuilding a more elastic and stronger muscle under load but must be given time to actually repair. Warm ups should include some form of static hold movement in the joints you'll be working followed up by proper 'feeler' sets and dynamic movements. I like to do one set of my first exercise at about 50% of my working weight for 10-20 reps, one set at 75% of my working weight at 5-8 reps, then you should be good to go! If doing a full body split, you may need multiple warm ups when you move from upper to lower body.

Mastering your technique and doing proper warm up will have the biggest impact on reducing your chance of hurting yourself.

Barbell bench press is one of the most common movements to injure your shoulder

Now let's talk about what to do if you get hurt.

If you feel a pinch or pain during a movement, STOP IMMEDIATELY. Don't try and push through it, don't be a hero and live to lift another day. Often times a slight pinch is just your first sign. More often than not if I put the weight down and give it a few minutes the pain does not return. If you push through, that's when you really turn it into injury. Now if the pain does return or maybe something is sore at the start of your session? Don't give up, try another movement! Maybe a single leg movement is hurting but once you do both legs together then is no pain. Do some light testing, try other exercises and find what hurts and what doesn't. Too many times I see people have a slight twinge and then give up completely, don't let that be you. There are so many angles and ways to train a muscle and you can almost always find a work around... but what if it's worse than that? I'm talking throbbing, tears, breaks etc. Let's talk about it.

Massage is great relaxer and can help alleviate pain in the short term, but make sure you address the root cause.

Ok so you've got a real injury, can barely move your arm or you've broken a bone. Doctor's orders are to rest for 8 weeks. Time to quit, right? WRONG. The rest of your body still works fine. Broken arm? Train legs. Sprained ankle? Upper body still works, whats the problem? Focus on what you can do, not what you can't do and stay in the game. You remember how hard it was to get started? Try restarting, it's harder. My only caution with this advise is this: If you've injured one limb, do not train the working limb. This is cause future imbalance which will then again cause future injury. My general approach is take a week off, then continue with what you're able to do.

Let's now touch on treatment. Massage and Chiro can be great short term pain relief, but do not rely on them to fix your issue. See a physiotheripist, they are much better equipped to find a root cause, weakness, tightness or imbalance that will have a lasting outcome. People like massage or chiro because it's immediate, but like you've learned from lifting - quick fixes don't work for long term gains. Physio doesn't work because you don't do it as instructed and it takes time to see progress. This is a you problem. So you keep doing your weekly massage hoping for a fix that never comes. Don't fall into this trap. Unfortunately it takes work to resolve the weakness and imbalance that caused your injury in the first place.

I can proudly say in my years of coaching, I have never had a single client suffer any major injury working with me (always happens when I'm not there). Nothing will set you back further than injury, which is another great reason that hiring a competent coach (Hello, I'm right here!) can do more than you can imagine for your progress. Book a free session with me on the contact page to get started.