Don't Ignore the Signs - Are You Your Own Worst Enemy?

As much as we may not want to believe it, we can be our own worst enemy when it comes to pain and injury, both in rehabilitation and prevention.

Our body is intelligent enough to send all the signs necessary to stop something, or at least slow down.

But whether we listen is another story.

Ambition for her first pull-up

I worked with a client who wanted to do her first pull-up. And she achieved it.

But she wasn’t mentioning the increasing elbow pain she was feeling on her left side. At first, she had to shake her arm between reps of pullups to get the “kink” out. Eventually, she could no longer tolerate an overhand grip because it irritated her elbow so much.

Then she got diagnosed with tennis elbow.

This didn’t happen as a result of one workout or one set of pullups, but because of the accumulation of training stress on her elbow without listening to the signs.

We sometimes get so caught up in our goals (and the ambition and drive are fantastic) that we ignore clear signs that something is wrong. And then we act shocked and wonder what happened when our body gives us an “impossible to ignore” sign.

This takes the form of physically being unable to do what we want anymore.

And that’s what happened here. Although she made a lot of progress with pullups, she was forced to take a break from them, and we modified her training accordingly.

The tortoise and the hare - Injury prevention 101

It’s perfectly fine to push yourself hard. But what happened here is the result of impatience.

Play the long game. You’ll make more progress if you gradually increase your overall training load while taking it easy when you need to. The rest can be just as important as the work.

This will make it so you have no setbacks and no instances where you’re forced to stop pursuing your goals.

Don’t be your own worst enemy and remain as self-aware as possible.

To your good health,

Coach Stephen

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Thanks for reading.

P.S.

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