What To Do About Injuries
Injuries
Injuries can be a major roadblock in training readiness and overall fitness and health. Almost all of us will sustain an injury of some kind in our lives. Understanding why you have injury or limitations and what you can do to try and solve these problems on your own is a meaningful part of owning your health.
Most injuries that aren’t pathological or impact-related are movement-related. This means that the way you are moving or, in some cases, not moving can be the root cause of your injury. When I’m first meeting a new client, we don’t sit down in a consult room or go through a series of assessments in front of the gym mirror, we head out on a walk so I can really get to know the person, what they are looking for, what fitness activities they have done and enjoyed in the past, and also what their barriers to fitness are, including what movement-related injuries they might have.
The tissue in our body around our muscles is connected almost everywhere. It’s like grabbing the corner of the bottom of your shirt and pulling on it. You’ll notice that it doesn’t tighten at the site where you are pulling. Rather, it tightens in the opposite direction or the corner, by your shoulder. By using compression tools like foam rollers, lacrosse balls, tennis balls, or yoga balls for compression in the tissue above or below the site of injury, we can feed relief to the site of injury.
Tips for using a foam roller:
There is no wrong way to do it. If there is something you want to compress, find a way to do it. Be creative. You can roll out on the floor or against the wall, as long as you can find ways to get as much body weight on the foam roller as possible.
If you are trying to solve a problem or an injury, be open to searching for places above or below the injury site to see if you find something sensitive.
“Normal” is full compression of your body weight. This means you should be able to put all your body weight on the foam roller pain-free. (But listen to your body. If you are recovering from an injury or are new to foam rolling, go slow.)
Breathe. If you haven’t done something like this in a long time, you may be very sensitive to compression. Make sure that you don’t hold your breath. Try to breathe deeply into the area you are trying to compress. If you can’t take a deep breath, it’s too much compression.
Pain is okay. If you are working on a troubled spot, it should be painful, but not to the point that you can’t breathe. And the pain shouldn’t feel weird, like you are causing damage or compressing a nerve, which would feel hot and tingly. It should be a good pain in a way. It should be a very focused experience in which you have to breathe through the tension and pain.
When you find a trouble spot, you can just hold there for a trigger-point release.
You can also find a spot and then start to move over that spot, pancaking side to side or moving the roller over it with shorter rolls.
You can also put pressure on the site and then move the nearest joint to the site you are working on. This is called a tack and floss technique because you are tacking down the unhealthy tissue and then flossing it under pressure as you move the joint. For example, if I’m working on my upper leg or quad, I can find the spot that hurts and then move at the knee by kicking my heel to my butt. This helps the tissue move under pressure, which is a good way to help release it.
Foam rolling can be used for many things, but if you are using it to help with injury or sensitive tissue, it’s going to hurt, and that’s okay. It may take consistent work on that spot—two minutes per time, several times daily for several weeks—to get sustained relief.
See you in the gym,
Aaron Leventhal CSCS, PN1