Apply stress with training, then facilitate compensation with recovery.
In part 2, we wrapped up on chronic recovery. I even made a bold claim:
“If these were all you worked on — more and better sleep, more water and better food, less stress — you would probably recover just fine, relative to an amateur athlete’s needs.”
That’s one of those rose-colored lenses, “under ideal conditions” sort of statements. It assumes that you dose training just right, dose recovery just right, and nothing unexpected ever happens.
What about when you dose training too high?
What about when you dose recovery too low?
What about when something unexpected happens?
Those questions all point to acute recovery. And the thing on everyone’s mind about acute recovery is the most critical condition to keeping your athletic career moving — how to manage injuries.
Acute Recovery and Injury Management
I’ve written about this extensively from a narrow view (the “What Hurts?” series, “When It Hurts” and “The Busy Athlete’s Guide to Injury Management“), so I want to talk about principles of injury management this time.
First: All chronic injuries are preventable.
Second: All collisions represent acute/catastrophic injury risk.
Third: There is a difference between prevention, management, and rehabilitation.
All chronic injuries are preventable.
If you manage chronic recovery and you make smart training choices, you will not experience chronic injuries. There are a few factors to chronic injury:
• excessive loading
• repetitive motion
• dysfunctional asymmetry
Plan to start running? Start easier than you have to, for less distance than you want to, less often than you could. Increase your distance and pace so little each run that you barely notice. Do this for a lot longer than you think. If you increase load slowly, you minimize injury risk.
So you’ve started running? Jog on varied terrain — sand, rocks, concrete, grass; uphill, downhill, flat ground — with varied cadence — short, choppy strides sometimes and long, loping strides at others. If you vary your movement, you minimize injury risk.
Really committing to your running? Jogging is foot and quad dominant. Spend extra time working on your calves, hamstrings and glutes. Massage your feet and stretch your quads and hip flexors.
Sprinting is hamstring and glute dominant, with enormous load on the spinal erectors. Spend extra time keeping your feet and calves happy; do your ab work. If you keep the body functionally symmetric, you minimize injury risk.
Shin splints, Achilles micro-tears, and low back spasm from tight hip flexors are chronic injuries. They are 100% preventable. So prevent them!
All collisions represent acute/catastrophic injury risk.
If you hit people, objects, or the ground inadvertently in your sport, injury is likely.
If you hit people, objects, or the ground on purpose in your sport, injury is nearly inevitable.
There are a few factors to impact injuries, but know that all you can do is reduce the risk; you can’t eliminate it!
• body armor
• reactive/reflexive movement patterns
• flexibility & mobility
• luck
“Armor building” is a phrase I’ve taken from Dan John, but the concept is as old as combat. If you’re going to hit something, you need to practice hitting it, so your skin and joints toughen up.
In rugby and American football, that means you practice tackling. In baseball and softball, that means you practice sliding. In any sport on grass, you practice tumbling.
Actually, every athlete benefits from tumbling. Every *human* benefits from tumbling. It teaches you how to stumble, how to fall, how to roll, and how to recover. Bonus points: it conditions your skin and joints to contact!
That conditioning of your skin and joints is armor building. What sport you play determines how much body armor you need. A fighter needs all the tumbling and a healthy dose of aggressive contacts all over the body. A diver needs the aggressive contact, but in a very particular body positions, so they can take the bad dives while losing the fewest points.
But everyone who might hit anything or is likely to fall during play — basketball, tennis, mountain biking, pole vaulting — needs armor. Build it intelligently and you’ve taken a big step toward reducing injury risk.
*
Part of the magic of tumbling is that it teaches you to hit the ground and keep moving. Reflexive and reactive movement patterns are related to that idea — how do you take the hit and keep moving, regardless of where the hit comes from and without time to think?
You pick up a lot of this skill from playing your sport and trying hard to NOT get hit. But it’s not actually when you are graceful and seamless that you develop this skill. It’s when a back falls over during a spin move, when a tennis player slides out trying to return a corner shot, and when a soccer forward gets shoulder checked by a defender at full speed that the skill develops. Your brain is spectacular at finding a path out. You just need to expose it to enough scenarios for it to consolidate that path out into a skill.
This is actually the advantage of playing lots of different sports. You learn thousands of different movement scenarios under pressure and your brain fights to consolidate them down to principles. You eventually settle on reactive patterns that simply work for your body, regardless of context.
Reactive patterns are not taught, they are practiced. So the more you play – play your sport, play other sports, and just play outside – the sooner you’ll build reactive patterns that help reduce your risk of injury.
*
In a recent post presumably about mental toughness (specifically, why I don’t care about it!), I talked about capacity. As an athlete, you need a certain amount of cognitive capacity while performing your sport in order to manage novel situations. To prevent injury, you need a certain amount of movement capacity when the unexpected happens in order to not damage tissue.
Despite how dismissive I was about flexibility and mobility in this post, I believe it’s critically important to have a little extra range of motion beyond your typical sport movement’s specific requirements. This is called functional reserve. If I require 180 degrees of shoulder flexion as a weightlifter to secure a jerk overhead, it is a good idea for me to have control over 210 degrees or so. Not every jerk will arrive in the perfect overhead position — I don’t want to miss the lift, sure, but I really don’t want to rip my shoulder apart from being a few degrees off!
Functional reserve applies to movement in every sport.
A dancer who needs a flat front split pursues a slightly suspended split. It’s not just for the bragging rights. A bit of extra range means (1) less muscular effort is required to split the legs; (2) the split position is more consistent; and (3) should that dancer slip during or crash into the split, they are less likely to injure their hips because there is functional range available.
So it benefits an athlete to be very slightly more flexible than their sport demands. That other article isn’t against stretching and mobilizing. It’s actually a subtle message about postural habits. Natural human range of motion is adequate for preventing a lot of injuries…but as desk workers with mild to severe upper crossed syndrome, most of us lack that natural range of motion. Our upper backs are weak and stretched out while our chests and shoulders are tight and shortened.
If you can’t easily flex your shoulder to 180 — that’s just straight up in the air! — then you carry a lot of risk when you fall with your arm out. Do enough flexibility work to get normal range back and you’ve done nearly enough to reduce your risk of injury.
*
Oh, and in sport, some moments you’re lucky, some moments you’re not. I’ve had jaw-dropping “over the bars and into a tree” mountain bike crashes that scratched my jersey and bent my brake lever…then I’ve had rear wheel slips during commutes that left me bloody and mildly concussed. Don’t discount luck in injury prevention — but don’t depend on it either.
Finally, I might just talk about management! Just kidding, that’s not this post. We’re still actually talking about recovery, if you can believe it. But we’re talking about habits and choices. See, most of recovery isn’t what you do when something hurts. It’s what you habitually do to minimize what will hurt — because those habits will help you return to normal function faster.
And this brings us to the final point today:
There is a difference between prevention, management, and rehabilitation.
Prevention is the gold standard of physical preparation. Prevention comes from intelligent training and diligent restoration. Prevention is the sum of everything you do to be prepared to perform: strength development, speed development, energy system conditioning, armor building, flexibility development, and agility development. When you do prevention right, there is very little management and virtually no rehabilitation to do!
Management, though, is continuing to just get through. When you’re mid-tournament, it’s no time for rehab. When you’re in-season, it’s really no time for rehab. Management can look like prevention activity, but sadly, it’s the only time most athletes do that activity consistently.
I foam roll more consistently after a quad strain than I do during off-season preparation.
I started mobilizing external rotation more aggressively after I strained my wrist and pulled my trap during a jerk.
Instead of dropping my training volume or frequency, I started using joint tape and wraps and straps to support my joints…
Management is a necessity, but the effort we put into it is firmly “too little, too late.”
Rehabilitation is the domain of physical therapists. We would all be wiser to consult them *before* we get hurt, in fact *before* we start training…but that’s comparable wisdom to consulting a tax attorney before you’ve earned (and spent) all your money for the year. I’m just not that wise, honestly.
But the saddest part about rehab is that most athletes don’t ever see it through! A professional in physical rehabilitation lays out a plan to restore full function in line with the requirements of my sport, and the thing I’m least likely to do is follow their plan to its finish line. That doesn’t make a bit of sense, but it’s true.
So why don’t we follow rehab plans?
They start small and slow and easy, progress extremely slowly, and last way longer than we think.
Funny, that point, how rehab plans look and feel exactly like good training plans for entering a new activity.
Yeah. Funny.
We can do training right the first time or we can do it twice. Or three or four or five times. If you’re like me, you can be dumb enough to injury your low back eight times in a career from pushing up your load, reps, and frequency in the squat in parallel to trying to perform at every training session, yet still be in a hurry to squat heavy and run fast six days a week as soon as you return to lifting and sprinting…
The Key to Acute Recovery From Injury
Acute and catastrophic injuries are dumb. They are disruptive and unpredictable. You’re fully justified in hating them.
But chronic injuries and repeat injuries from not following my rehab plan are dumb injuries. They are just as disruptive. But they are predictable. They aren’t the fault of my body; they are the fault of my choices.
To be a successful athlete, you need years of consistent technical and physical development. Don’t force disruptions because of dumb choices.
The key to acute recovery — from an injury management perspective — is to not need it at all.
- Jump to [Part 1: A Series For Serious Athletes]
- Jump to [Part 2: It Starts With Your Habits]
- Jump to [Part 3: Some Injuries Are Dumb, Then There Are Dumb Injuries] (you’re here!)
- Jump to [Part 4: Make The Moments Count]
- Jump to [Part 5: It’s All About Your Habits]