It was Testing Week around here last week, our first using our new programming tools, and it successfully accomplished our main goals for such a week (hint: it wasn't ONLY for the bragging rights :). Along with several PBs (Personal Bests), this kind of highest-intensity exposure yielded some huge insights, for members and coaches alike, ranging from what the "right" weight feels like, to how regularly pseudo-peaking helps contextualize the normal swings of real-life (both topics for other blog posts...). But maybe the most useful lesson learned had nothing to do with achieving new bests; nope, instead, these moments of reckoning--of assessing and testing--forced the all-important confrontation with our own limitations, and all the ghoulish things you find there: injury*, frustration, weakness, and self-doubt.
In every physical realm, and I do mean EVERY single one, there is that always-present opponent, often dwelling near the edges but sometimes, dramatically, totally apparent. It's shadowy, abstract, unknown and lurking, until it is suddenly extremely real. It can alter careers, change life-trajectories and dictate how every hour of a person's life is spent. It is called injury.
Injuries are a problem! They are painful, they limit performance (both, in the actual moment and by restricting training leading up to an event), and, perhaps most consequentially, they are emotionally sapping. However, **if they can be seen as information (more accurately described as "desperate cries for help from the abused tissues") we can take the first step towards understanding, relieving, and ultimately, revitalizing those tissues as part of a more resilient whole. **
Taken objectively, injuries are actually pretty straight-forward. They occur when the load on any given tissue is greater than that tissue's load-bearing capacity. That's it. Exposed to that load, a tissue might spasm, strain, or break, depending on a million factors (what kind of tissue? what condition was the tissue? what about the load? any co-morbidities confusing things? etc). It is the job of medical professionals to determine these types of things.
Now--to be extremely clear--we are not doctors and we don't play them on TV. And for those very reasons, we have centered our business around helping people with the critical (and oft-neglected) steps back to function, after* all the diagnosis-treatment-therapy that should happen following a true injury. This return-to-function stage takes some time, and involves systematic exposure to low- and high-level stresses that address both joint-control/resiliency and holisitic adaptations, respectively. It is, basically, what our training encompasses.
Testing Week is simply the peak of those "high-level stresses", and as outlier experiences, they can give a certain tangibility to our personal "edges". Us coaches love these moments of clarity because of how real it makes the training: months of abstraction (...Google spreadsheet after google spreadsheet...) magically transform into cold, hard metal weights, moving majestically in the hands of our ever-more-skilled cohort of resilient humans... (cue lights).
Now, It is our job as their coach to set them up for success--to define, encourage, and frame growth experiences, and generally guide them toward getting better. Even so, working at the upper-reaches of current-ability necessarily means that sometimes, a client won't be able to achieve what they have previously, or what they expect from themselves. For these clients, the experience of attempting a personal best lift or set and falling short can be devastating, especially if they feel limited by a previous injury that has not fully recovered, or are worried about a future injury. They very easily shift into an adversarial relationship with their body ("Why would you fail me now, elbow/knee/back, etc!"); not exactly cohesive for growth...
Alternately, this kind of "failure" experience can be incredibly enlightening if--and this is a critical "IF"--the client can see the resulting information as the useful communication that it is: At THIS moment in time, THIS particular movement was beyond the maximum load-bearing capacity for the involved tissues. That's just as useful (and maybe more) than the personal best (because you always may have been able to do more...right?).
Moving forward, this information should help make training even more specific and effective. While this kind of approach can't ever guarantee that injuries won't happen, by involving these types of stresses in regular training, we can begin to see the greater context of our physical bodies--injuries, Personal Bests and everything in-between. The key is to use the information toward more wisdom*, and not just more self-flagellation. Injuries are many things, but they are not judgments of our character; that has much more to do with how you face and address what you find as you really go looking for your edges.
Stay strong!
On the topic of physical injury, we should say: we are not medical professionals, and we do not purport to offer diagnosis, treatment, prevention, or therapy for any injury or condition, and any info offered here is utterly based on our own experience and understanding of related research.*