Injury Recovery
Do you have pain? Is it limiting your ability to do the things you love in life?
Pain can be vulnerable to feel and to live with, it can feel as weakness, as an incapacity to fully live and enjoy life. It can feel as an embarrassment, as limiting in our daily life and impeding in how we move or would like to move.
A lot of times when people experience pain, they also grow afraid of moving. An old-fashioned way to deal with pain was to rest and allow it to recover. Whilst this is still true of certain injuries, today a lot of injuries come from lack of movement, from being too long in the same position, from experiencing stress and it building up in the body or from moving incorrectly. All of these cause some muscles to become too strong or crunched and others not strong enough, creating disbalances in the body that then create pain. To recover from these types of injuries, moving is crucial and an element of the recovery process. However, it’s not moving in any old way, this is why I encourage people to work with a trainer to work through injuries. In this way, they have an extra pair of eyes, more knowledge to understand the injury, space to listen to the pain and a program to both work towards healing it and preventing it from returning in the future.
How I go to work with someone who comes in with pain:
- LISTENING: The first step is coming in contact with the pain. Pain is the body’s alarm system that there is something not right. Once you are able to listen to it rather than avoid it, then the work can start. And maybe at first there will be more pain, just like when you look closely and work with a certain emotion, it first becomes stronger, more present, before it starts to release with the process of letting go. In some cases, physical pain can work in a similar way, but each person deals with pain and injury in their own way.
- ANALYSIS: Then we observe and recognise which muscles are being overused and which underused. The overused ones need to be released, for which I use myofascial release techniques, such as foam rolling, the usage of balls of different sizes and lengthening strength and mobility exercises. The underused muscles need to be strengthened in a way as closely as possible as to how you would use them in daily life. For this, my favourite tools are the breath, awareness, the cable machines, elastic bands and body weight exercises. Dumbells and extra resistance can also come into play later on. But most important is definitely awareness, understanding the injury and learning how to move correctly.
- STRENGTH BUILDING: Most of the time is building strength in the right muscles and getting strong enough to start to decrease the pain. Then a program of overall strength is recommendable to avoid the injury from too easily coming back. In this phase it’s important to closely observe if there are compensation patterns when adding difficulty or weight to the exercises to start to discover why the injury happened in the first place. Once we have a clue as to why it happened, we work together to debunk those compensation methods and rebuild new, better patterns of movement, making sure you are using the right muscles to create that strength.
Don’t let pain be a reason not to contact me to help you with that pain. Take that pain as a sign that something needs to be done. Asking for help is not weakness but a courageous act of listening and compassion toward your body and your needs.
