Why You Shouldn't Listen to Your Physical Therapist

Physical therapy is a great field and ever-evolving. It's filled with practitioners who are intelligent, highly educated and frequently just want to help people. These are all good things. Unfortunately physical therapy in it's current form has some severe limitations. As with most things, the issue is not the field itself. The field is moving in the right direction. The problem is the individual clinicians.

The main issue with the average therapist is not one of capability or education. You can't be what they are or do what they do if you lack either. No, the problem actually happens to be the place from where they precede; in other words, the motivation that drives their practice. My initial foray into human physiology came through the window of human performance. Most of my education and research was driven by the pursuit of lifting massive amounts of weight, running absurdly fast and being able to hit things with the force of a sun-drunk Superman. As such, the paradigms that I developed in my mind on how to deal with and improve human movement dysfunctions all had their basis in performance enhancement. On the flip side, most therapists' educations begins deeply embedded in the hippocratic oath: the desire to do no harm.

This is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. It's situational. If you are elderly and your body is all jacked up from years and years of misuse, you have a low pain tolerance and all you really want to be able to do is go up and down your stairs then the therapist who's main goal is not to hurt you may be entirely capable. This is a fairly hyperbolic example but there are plenty of cases where the desire to fix as much as you can while never hurting your patient is entirely useful. Not everyone is trying to become a monster athlete. Physical therapists are incredibly effective at getting you back to baseline because it is exactly what they are taught to do.

The system breaks down when you're dealing with people like me, or, chances are if you're reading this blog, someone like you. If you are always trying to push yourself to be bigger, faster and stronger then taking "do no harm," approach is like driving with the parking brake on. No matter how much you floor the pedal it's still going to hold you back.

As long as we have therapists telling athletes not to lift heavy and to keep their arms below overhead if it hurts their shoulder we're going to have a damaged field. These are simply not acceptable responses. Yes, of course there are going to be situations where the damage to the patient is so severe that there are activities they will no be capable of, but if you are willing to clear a patient to go play college football yet you still advise them to not lift heavy weights then, simply put, you're a f*cking idiot. So, you think this person's body is capable of performing dynamic, multi-planar movements at explosive speeds and possesses the physical integrity to take hits that are thousands of pounds of force and they're going to be okay... but performing repetitive exercises in a controlled environment is dangerous because the load is too high? Seriously guys?

The problem, once again, comes from the initiation of the advice. Most physical therapists don't care how much you can squat or bench press. All they care about is that you are pain free and you don't have inflammation. Therefore all of their recommendations and modifications have this goal in mind: don't go past parallel on a squat, don't deadlift heavy weight, don't do overhead presses and for the love of god don't ever lift more than your bodyweight because all of that stuff might hurt you. If that's all I ever cared about I would never get out of bed in the morning and as a clinician if these are the goals for your patients you're f*ckin' up.

That being said both Grey Cook and Kelly Starrett are DPTs and not only are they brilliant clinicians but they are spearheading the movement in the field to integrate strength and conditioning into clinical practice. I am a huge fan of their philosophies and practices because they believe what I believe: whether you're rehabbing a post surgical joint or improving the efficiency of a power clean it's all the same thing. Healthy is healthy, disordered is disordered and no matter how you slice it movement is movement.

So that's my rant for today but it raises an important question I think. You all know how I feel about the average personal trainer and now I'm telling you you can't trust DPTs either? But then whoever shall I trust for all of my exercise science needs?!?! Who?!?!

RELEVANT. Really. Batman is always relevant. 

My goal was not tell you that PTs are bad. They're not. Nor was it to tell you that they don't know what they're doing. They do. This post, like a few others, was more aimed at broadening your horizons and helping you guys see the big picture a little bit better. If you are an athlete you need a PT who understands and respects that. You need a PT who can show you how to do what you want to do better and prevent you from re-injuring yourself, not a PT who tries to prevent re-injury through avoidance. Becoming Invincible is about confronting your weaknesses head on and beating the sh*t out of them until they become strengths. Next time your PT tells you not to do something ask them why. If their response is anything other than "your joint is so compromised that doing this movement in any way will absolutely lead to injury," then it might be time to start looking for a new clinician. 

Do me a favor though? Don't use this post as an excuse to talk to them like they're dumb. They may not be perfect for athletes yet, but that same therapist who told you not to break parallel with your knees might have just helped a little boy walk for his first time. It's all relative, kids. 

Good luck and good lifting.

Cheers. 

Self Soft-tissue Mobilization (How to Use a Foam Roller)

So you've probably seen these things. They're all over the place nowadays, in gyms and sporting goods stores. You might even see them at a chiropractor or  a physical therapy clinic. Many of us are familiar with the bitter sweet combination of pain and relief they bring to sore, battered muscles. Others of us are probably asking themselves a very simple and totally reasonable question:

"What the hell are these weird looking foam tubes?"

Well, my post-workout recovery challenged friends, this weird looking foam tube might just be your new best friend. I covered this subject briefly in a previous post but I only really addressed what it's good for, not how to use it. The foam roller is one of the cheapest and most versatile tools for self soft-tissue mobilization (SSTM). Sounds fancy and science-y (and frankly I'm not sure it's a real term) but what it means is that this simple foam cylinder can help unglue immobile tissue, increase joint mobility and range of motion and ultimately help make you bigger, more bad-ass and a bit closer to becoming invincible.

So, how does it work and how do you use one? First, a quick anatomy lesson.
Our muscles and our musculoskeletal system is not one single, contiguous unit. Just like an engine in a car it is a large, functioning system made up of a number of smaller pieces. First and foremost (because this is a Strength blog, damn it) are your muscles:

As you can see your muscles are made up of several smaller units that are all wrapped into bundle and each bundle is made up of similarly smaller units wrapped in similar bundles. Uhm, right. I think that made sense. Anyway, each one of these "bundles" is surrounded by fascia, a type of woven connective tissue that holds everything together. At any point in any of these units a number of things can happen. 

You know how when you go to get a massage they work out all those nasty "knots" in your muscles? This is one of the ways that tissue gets glued down. A "knot" is a group of fibers that at some point contracted and then failed to relax all of the way. In addition to this, all of your tissues need to be be able to slide over one another well enough to allow motion. If some of your muscle tissue is tied down because of some type of scar tissue (frequently referred to as an "adhesion") then the tissues can't move properly which means you can't move properly.

In addition to our muscles we also have tendons and ligaments. Our tendons attach muscles to bone and our ligaments attach bones to each other. Similar to muscles, ligaments and tendons can also become victim to some type of adhesion or get locked down and become immobile due to local inflammation or muscle stiffness. What I mean is this, your tendons attach your muscles to your bones so if the muscle being attached is tonic (partially contracted) the tendon may be pulled tighter than it should at all times which will reduce the motion of the antagonist muscles (the muscles that move the joint in the opposite direction i.e. bicep-tricep, quad-hamstring etc.) and may lead to joint stiffness, pain and lost range of motion. Honestly, you're probably not going to be doing a whole lot of tendon or ligament mobilization with a foam roller. This is usually pretty specific soft tissue work that a trained clinician performs with their hands but I figured it was worth mentioning. 

Ligaments! (That's a foot, in case you weren't sure.)

Tendons! (And this is an elbow. Really. Swear.)

Finally, we can't forget about our big beautiful epidermis. That's a fancy word for skin. Get your mind out of the gutter. While skin isn't a contractile tissue nor is it truly structural, it can still get tacked down the way your muscles, ligaments and tendons do to an extent which can ultimately lead to the same problems. If you're movement's not good then you can't exercise....um...good-ly. Right. 

Skin! Totally how it looks in your body. Same colors and everything. Come on, would I lie to you?

So we've got a few different types of tissue that love to get all up in each others business and cause more physiological drama than a Mean Girl with a Facebook app. So what do we do? Enter your White Knight: Sir Foam Roller of Mobilization.

Sigh. Sometimes even I realize how bad my jokes are. Anyway, these things come in all sorts of shapes and sizes some as simple as a round piece of foam like those pictured above and then theres some crazier ones. Like these. 

If you're new to foam rolling I would recommend starting with the simple, basic foam roller. The more complex variations like the two pictured above tend to be made of a harder material (PVC pipe or something similar on the inside as opposed to foam) and are therefore more painful. They are also ridged or pointed so that you can apply more direct, focused pressure to certain tissues; something that you'll need a little experience with SSTM before you can realistically or effectively approach.

Now that you understand the anatomy and you've acquired your weapon of choice, let's talk about how to use it. It would be wonderful if simple laying down and rolling back and forth on it was effective and I think a lot of personal trainers and fitness publications out there would have you believe this. Hell, I've seen DPTs prescribe this kind of activity to patients. It might feel better for a little while but if you're just fumbling around you're hardly going to effect any kind of significant or long lasting change. In order to do that, you need to have a purpose and a plan. 

Foam Rolling Techniques

1. Intermittent Pressure - This is basically rolling back and forth on a knot. I know, I know. I just told you absently rolling around is pointless and I'm not retracting that statement. The purpose of intermittent pressure is to locate a knot or a location of tied down tissue (these are indicated by a sharp increase in pain when you pass over them. Trust me, you'll know.) Now, using the foam roller as your divining rod and the sensation of pain as your indicator, locate the limits of the knot. Once you've found them, stay inside them and roll back and forth while deliberately attempting to relax your muscles. Continue doing this until you feel a change in the tissue. You can keep doing it for as long as you can stand it but once you've gone a minute or two and feel like nothing's changed, you're probably done with that location for the moment. There's only so much you can fix in a single application.

2. Constant Pressure with Contraction/Relaxation - This is the method that I personally think sucks the most in terms of pain. You begin initially with a similar technique as Intermittent Pressure to locate immobile tissue.  Now, instead of finding the outer limits of the pain, find the central, most painful location. Apply constant pressure and then contract your muscle fully and hold for a few seconds. Once you start to relax do it slowly and consciously, don't just let your muscle go slack in a second. You should be able to relax further than you did when you initially placed the pressure over the muscle. Once again, repeat the technique until you feel that you've effected enough of a change or you feel like nothing significant is happening anymore.

3. Constant pressure with joint motion - Again, begin by locating what feels like tacked down tissue. Now, while maintaining pressure on the tissue, begin moving the joint that muscle controls through it's range of motion. Attempt to move it as much as possible in as many directions without significantly hurting yourself. This type of mobilization is great for breaking up adhesions or scar tissue. You know how sometimes when you have a loose thread on a shirt, if you try to pull it off it just pulls out more thread and keeps unraveling? Well, what do you do in that situation? You hold down the end of it and try to pull off the thread without unraveling more. This functions under the same principle. You pin down one end of the adhesion and try to remove it by moving the adhered tissue underneath it. As above, continue the technique until you feel you're no longer getting anything out of it.

Now that you understand the techniques, a few precautions to pay attention to:

-These mobilizations can take anywhere from 1-10 minutes, in some severe cases maybe even more. If you're spending 30 seconds on the foam roller you're not trying hard enough.

-while a simple foam-core roller may be effective initially, eventually you'll probably need something harder to get deep into your tissues particularly if you're muscular. More muscle is great, but it means more tissue that can get knotted and tacked down and the denser the muscle the harder it becomes to create deep enough pressure to effect change. 

-these mobilizations are uncomfortable. They should not be painful. While some people would claim semantics the truth is that there is a significant difference. In the words of Dr. Kelly Starrett, "don't go into the pain cave." His point is that we are capable of doing some terrible things to ourselves if we go hide in our mental caves and we can shut out an immense amount of pain. Do not do this. If you need to go into the pain cave to deal with your mobilization you are most likely doing it too hard and damaging something.

Or you might be a wimp. But it's probably the first thing. Probably. 

So there you have it, go grab a foam roller and get rolling. You can apply these techniques to just about any muscle in your body. Don't let the floor restrict you, you can put a foam roller up against the wall or on top of a table and lean on it if you have to. Be creative but reasonable. You can also use a tennis ball, a lacrosse ball or even a rolling pin. Anything that will give you consistent, constant pressure. I used a barbell to roll out my quads the other day. It was fan-frigging-tastic. Really.

You can find foam rollers pretty much anywhere these days but my favorite equipment company is Rogue. You can also find a pretty wide selection at Perform Better (which is where the therapy company I worked for purchased theirs) but they can be a little overpriced at times. 

Well, I'm off to go watch my friends boyfriend do something absurdly badass and a little insane. Maybe if you guys are lucky I'll even tell you about it when I get back. Have a nice weekend kids. Good luck and good lifting.

Cheers. 

Mastering Movement

It' a bit of a philosophical Friday. Bear with me. It's worth it. Now watch this video. It's not an absolute must, but it serves as a solid primer for what I'm going to discuss. It's by Elliot Hulse, one of the very few bro-like strength experts who I actually think is brilliant in his own way. Check it out, at least the first minute or so. (Warning: NSFW language) If you're on your phone the embedded video may not work. You can find it here.

Strength training. Running. Injury prevention. Rehabilitation. Exercise Correction.

On the surface it seems like these are all very different aspects of human performance. As someone with a background in both performance enhancement and clinical rehab, I can tell you that many of the driving principles behind these things do seem to contradict one another. Running tends to take long bouts of repetitive motion. Strength training improves fastest with a periodized program that includes intentional variety. Getting stronger usually requires focusing on big, multi-joint, multi-muscle compound lifts. Rehabilitating injuries usually means the opposite, isolating single joints and single muscles. Corrective exercises supposedly focus on balancing imbalances and fixing structural deficiencies. As I said, they all appear to be very different.

The reality? They're not. They're all the same thing. At the end of the day it all comes down to fundamental human movement.

Exercise science is a constantly evolving field. Sometimes the direction is confusing to me, but one of the prevalent paradigms that is beginning to rise to the forefront is this: the mastery of basic human movements trumps all else in terms of genuine fitness and functionality. That's why you start to hear trainers referring to "movements" rather than "exercises." I do it fairly frequently. To some it may seem like semantics but in my opinion it's not only different, but understanding the difference can be both useful and instructive.

If you've read this blog at any length then you know how much I harp on proper form and technique. I've already stated that in terms of both getting the most out of your workouts and preventing injuries proper technique is paramount. It's also larger than that, quite a bit larger. The key to true functional fitness is the attainment of healthy movement patterns and building strength in and through those movements.

This may seem like a bunch of esoteric fitness guru b.s. but I'm going to try to break it down to make it a bit more accessible. I'm not trying to sell you on some mystical fitness philosophy. I'm trying to point out a simple truth that we've been dancing around for years and for some reason we've only recently come to acknowledge. I'm not blaming anyone. It's something I've only recently come to realize myself.

I have a bad hip and a bad shoulder. They're both old injuries from when I used to do MMA. My hip is jacked up from throwing high kicks without the proper flexibility or focus on technique and my shoulder is messed up from a combination of jujitsu training, throwing too many punches and having landed on it wrong one time when a girl half my size flipped me over her back. (Yes, that happened. No, I don't want to talk about it.) 

Both of these injuries plagued me for years. While I was working at the physical therapy clinic I would frequently request fixes from the PTs to the point that they all became somewhat annoyed with my constant pestering. Now, I can understand not wanting to do more work for free after having put in a ten hour shift, but I never really did understand why they would seem so irritated until one of them explained it to me. Basically the general consensus was that I was constantly injured and in pain because I was constantly doing dangerous and (in their opinion) stupid things to my body. They could give me a "fix," but ultimately I would just go back and spar with someone and undo whatever good their fix had done. This underlies one of my biggest problems with the PT profession. Do nothing is not a solution. 

In the short term, resting injured joints and muscles can have obvious benefits. That is not what I'm talking about. What I'm saying is that frequently if you ask a physical therapist how to stop the pain you get in your shoulder from say, heavy bench presses, their answer will be painfully simple: stop doing heavy bench presses. As far as I'm concerned, if your solution to an athlete's nagging issue is to tell them to stop participating in an activity they clearly love, you are a poor practitioner. There are obvious exceptions, i.e. if you just had your hip replaced you probably shouldn't try to go back into your tae-kwon-do class, but if you are an otherwise healthy individual and the only solution they can offer is, "stop," then they aren't doing their job. I think, unfortunately, this solution frequently arises simply because the practitioner has run out of options and is frustrated that they can't solve their patients issue. Giving up, however, is not the appropriate response, nor is telling the patient to give up as well.

Anyway, back to my injuries. After having tried all sorts of different "rehabilitative" techniques I decided to step back from martial arts for a while to give my body time to repair itself. The trouble was that my injuries had become so bad that they were preventing me from even working out normally. I couldn't do a set of pushups without my shoulder flaring up and if I ran at any speed more than 6 miles per hour my hip and groin would get so tight that I would be walking funny for days. Honestly the pain had gotten so bad it was just a part of my day-to-day. It wasn't ever 10/10, but it was constantly there in the background, buzzing and annoying me and always ready to scream at me anytime I moved too quickly or in a slightly incorrect direction. 

So what did I turn to? Powerlifting. It seems like a bizarre choice until you examine the underlying logic. What was causing the injuries to flare up was a lot of intense, fast and repetitious movements at both joints. Powerlifting training typically involves sets of very few reps and very simple motions. You squat, you deadlift, you bench and sometimes if you get really ambitious you overhead press. I would also throw in some pull-ups to balance it out. That's pretty much it. With just those five movements you're hitting all of the basics. It may seem counterintuitive but after a couple of weeks of training basic movements with heavy weights a really interesting thing happened: my pain went away.

For a while I figured it was just that the pain was gone because I was no longer doing the things that would set it off. I was worried that were I to go back and try any of that stuff, it would come right back. I stuck with the heavy lifting for another month or so until my joints were feeling so good that I figured, hey, what the heck. I did a CrossFit workout that involved a gnarly combination of sprinting, push ups, pull ups, and dips. 6 months prior that would have been a direct recipe for sitting on my couch in pain all weekend, unable to walk with my arm in a sling. But that's not what happened. I crushed the workout and there was no pain, just that amazing workout afterglow of having beat the ever living sh*t out of yourself while loving every second. 

I've been doing this fitness thing for a while now. I've been reading, researching and self experimenting with all sorts of modalities and philosophies for almost thirteen years. I have a degree in the subject and several certifications and even with all of that education and practical experience the realization hit me like a freight train. I was wrong. All that time and all of those years, I'd been doing the wrong things.

I was focusing on numbers and times. I was more interested in the way I looked in the mirror than the way my joints felt at night. I always went as hard as I could no matter what because no pain, no gain, right? Wrong. Oh so very, utterly wrong.

Powerlifting requires complete mastery of the technique involved in each individual lift. Mastery of the technique involves serious structural integrity and flexibility through every joint and muscle. You can't do a real squat with tight hips and poor thoracic extension. You can't bench press properly with overly tight shoulders and you really can't deadlift well if you have terrible posture. The same muscles and anatomical configurations that aid in your ability to do those lifts, aid in your bodies ability to function at a maximal capacity.

So why are we told to stay away?

A lot of people think lifting heavy is just for meatheads and morons. It's how you get hurt. You guys know how I feel about that. You get hurt from being stupid, not from going big. Accidents do happen, but claiming that lifting heavy is dangerous is tantamount to saying eating makes you fat. Sure, it's possible if you're not paying attention but that hardly makes it an absolute outcome. Lifting heavy forced me to learn how to truly squat in an anatomically beneficial manner for the first time in my life. Lifting heavy forced me to learn how to use proper posture to stabilize myself while deadlifting and doing overhead presses. Lifting heavy forced me to re-program faulty movement patterns into healthy ones and the benefits were far more than simply adding a hundred pounds to every lift.

After you learn how to squat properly every time you bend down to pick something up your bodies preferred method of doing so is healthy and reinforces a beneficial pattern, rather than placing unnecessary stress on the wrong structures and eventually leading to a silly and completely avoidable overuse injury. It teaches you how to land properly, how to use your legs to absorb shock. Learning how to lunge is an incredible asset to any athlete because it teaches you how to stop and drop your center of gravity in a healthy way. Whether you're catching a frisbee or reaching for a lacrosse ball, an athlete who can forward, side and crossover lunge properly is going to do it faster and with less chance of injury than the one who was never taught how to do so. The same principle applies for every basic movement: overhead pressing teaches you how to lift things over your head safely, pull-ups can teach you how to climb better and how to use the pulling muscles of your body to do just that; pull. Think about how profound the effect on your overall health would be if you had a healthy and proper running gait as opposed to a dangerous and inefficient one.

This is also why I have a negative view of things like the Bosu and all of that obnoxious, overly complicated "functional" fitness crap that certain vendors are pushing these days. These accessories can be good to change it up from time to time, but every program should be built around basic human movements. There's nothing basic, functional, or transferrable about hopping onto and off of a Bosu while waving a weighted bar over your head like a ninja turtle on meth. There's also a lot of evidence that the balance you learn on an unstable surface only translates to other unstable surfaces. In other words, being able to balance on a Bosu won't help you balance better on flat ground. Seems counter intuitive I suppose, but think about it. You're training your nervous system to respond to a lack of stability. When you stand on a stable surface you're now providing a stimulus you haven't trained for and as such, your body responds by not knowing what the heck it's supposed to do. Pretty straight forward, really. 

When we move properly we are stronger, faster and more efficient. We are also healthier and less likely to get hurt. It absolutely bears mentioning that the bio-mechanically correct way for me to do these motions will not be exactly the same as the way you do them. Every body is different and as such every movement is unique. That is not to say that there aren't certain guidelines you should follow and any trainer worth their salt should be capable of teaching them to you. 

Also, on that note, there is a trend in gyms these days that I want to warn you guys about: Corrective Exercise Specialists. Do not trust these people. Despite what I said about physical therapists earlier, I do think that they are frequently incredibly intelligent and highly educated. I have my issues with their practice but we all know that nothing is perfect. In order to become a PT you need a bachelor's degree and then a 3 year doctorate. People with a CES basically claim to be able to do what PT's do and you don't even need a high school diploma to become one. If that doesn't make you skeptical I would seriously question your capacity for rational thought, or at the very least assume you have a drinking problem. One of the best things I learned form my foray into powerlifting is that the best corrections, very simply, are regressions. If you can't do it right, lower the weight until you can. If your form sucks you have no business lifting that heavy weight any way. Check your ego, go back to the foundation and build it correctly. In many cases muscular imbalances are the result of improper movement patterns. Fix the patterns, and you should fix the imbalances as well. 

Humans are obligatory movers. It's the reason we so thoroughly admire athletes and feats of physical prowess. We are drawn to their examples on a primal level. Throughout history our survival and the advancement of our societies has depended on our physicality. Whether it was the ability to hunt down a meal, escape a predator, or defend ourselves in a large scale physical conflict, human beings are obligate physical creatures. It is a defining aspect of who are and it seems, as of late, most of us have forgotten that. If you're here and you're still reading, chances are you aren't one of those people. Frankly, I think that's pretty awesome and I hope it never changes.

Good luck and good lifting. Happy Friday folks.

Cheers.

Injury Prevention

Injury prevention and rehabilitation is by no means my area of expertise. This is not because I do not have extensive experience with it. I've spent the last four years of my professional life in a managerial role at a high volume outpatient orthopedic rehab facility. I've actively participated in the rehabilitation of everyone from athletes and the elderly to a twelve year old child who was run over by a tractor. The purpose of telling you that I'm not an expert is not to undermine the advice I'm about to give you; it's to highlight the importance of a simple truth. Injury prevention and rehabilitation is an incredibly complex, multifaceted topic.

It's complicated for a number of reasons but the main one is fairly straightforward. Everyone's body is different. While there are established movement patterns that tend to be the best for certain exercises and tasks, ultimately every individual's ability to adhere to that strict pattern is going to be different and for some extreme cases, outright impossible. This principle applies to both rehabilitation and general fitness. While there are gold standard exercises, everyones tolerance to and individual benefits from each movement are going to be different and any proper program design should reflect this.

The way I see it there are two ends to the spectrum of human performance. On one side we have the rehabilitation and return to baseline. On the other side we have baseline into athletic performance enhancement and development. A confusing phenomenon is that on a very surface level the foundational principles of each side appear to contradict with one another. Rehab involves a huge amount of single joint, single muscle group isolation exercises where most athletic performance programs focus on training muscle groups and energy systems together. Of course, the more in depth your understanding becomes the more you realize that ultimately both modes of though can benefit from the other when applied in the appropriate situations. I'm going to do my best to synthesize my knowledge of both sides to provide you guys with some reasonable and easy to follow advice on how to avoid injuries and deal with minor setbacks along your path to becoming invincible.

Because Batman and rings. 

Guidelines for Injury Prevention 

or

 Keepin' it Proper

1) Proper Technique: I think I've gone over this multiple times but it absolutely bears mentioning here. Practicing and using proper technique is quite literally the most important aspect of injury prevention. If you are sacrificing proper form for increased weight or duration of an exercise, you're f*cking up. In training terms muscular failure is not meant to be considered the point where you can't move, it's the point where you can't complete another repetition with picture perfect form. This sh*t is not negotiable. Your form needs to be on point, always. If you aren't sure, find a professional who can help. In fact, if you send me a picture or video of your form on ANY exercise I would be happy to give you pointers, free of charge.

2)Proper warm up: This is probably another one that you've been told a thousand times but my guess is unless you're a competitive athlete you probably don't pay much attention to it either. Your body needs time to shift into gear before it can perform optimally. Fighters literally spend 30 minutes to an hour warming up before an actual bout. Now, if someone on their physical level still needs a warm up, don't you think you might too? It really doesn't matter if you are lifting weights, playing a sport or going bouldering blindfolded; your body needs to warm up. 

You need 5-7 minutes of a general warm up first, this is basically to raise your body's temperature and get your muscles moving. This could be anything: jumping rope, jogging in place, doing bear crawls or shooting a few hoops for example. The key is to start slowly and gradually increase until you're warm but not exhausted. After that you need 5-7 minutes of a specific warm up. If you're preparing for a sport, this portion of the warm up should involve sport specific movements and drills. If you're running, you should run. If you're going to be lifting weights, the best warm up is to do a couple of sets or even a circuit of the exercises you'll be doing with a lighter weight than your work weight. This will prep both your muscles and your nervous system for oncoming activity. When your muscles and connective tissue are warm they're more pliable and resistant to tear. When your nervous system has been activated it fires more efficiently and provides more consistent control of your body.

Sometimes selling people on a warm up to prevent injury is difficult so I'll tell you why I do it: it makes you stronger and better at whatever you're doing. If you warm up properly, you should be able to run faster, lift more and perform at a higher level in every way. A good warm up really is that effective.

It's important to note that what constitutes a good warm up is incredibly individual. What is a light warm up to some may be a moderate to intense work out for others. Proper care should always be used when selecting appropriate warm-up activities.

I'm starting to sound like a textbook. F*ck.

3) Proper training progression and periodization: Some of the most common injuries in sports are not related to a specific incident. They're overuse injuries; the result of too much training or repetition in a certain movement without enough recovery or cross training. Shin splints, tendonitis and recurring irritation or inflammations of that nature are some of the most common examples. There is a more sinister side to overuse injuries, however. 

When your body is injured or inflamed, you will typically have some type of concurrent performance loss (when your sh*ts fucked up, you don't do things quite so good as you used to). Our bodies are performance machines so they like to help us cheat. The result of these two things is that when you begin to have trouble with a certain movement, your body will attempt to cheat by altering the pattern in such a way that the task becomes easier and therefore doable. There's all sorts of biomechanics and complex physics having to do with moment arms and levers and sh*t but on a primal level you guys should all know what I'm talking about. Inflammation can lead to creation of unhealthy movement patterns that lead to further complications. They may even lead to a real, now-you-f*cked-up kind of injury where you need to have someone cut your sh*t open and sew it back together. The point is overuse injuries are very bad. They are also incredibly frustrating for us professionals because they are fairly easily prevented with proper training programs. 

Periodization is yet another complex topic to which many people have already dedicated gigantic, cryptically worded tomes and therefore something I can't do any real justice here. What follows is what I think are the most important considerations in terms of programming for preventing injuries:

-Focus on form FIRST- If you are doing any new exercise or a new routine, your ONLY focus should be on hitting the movements with absolute mechanical perfection (to the best of your ability). Increasing weight and intensity will come soon enough. First things first. 

-Increase weights/intensities at a steady but REASONABLE rate- Once you've got your form down you can focus on upping your intensity but this is the most common place where people lose focus. We all want to go harder and faster (...) and our bodies are excellent at cheating our way to it. Don't do that.   While your muscles may be getting bigger and stronger the support structures don't grow at the same rate (your tendons grow at about 1/10th the speed of your muscle fibers). You need to give your body time to catch up and maintain its structural integrity. The most common recommendation I've heard is the 10% rule. You should not increase your total workload by more than 10% a week. That means if you run three miles this week you shouldn't try to run more than 3.3 next week. It's important to note that this increase is per WEEK, not workout. With lifting I would be a bit more conservative, sometimes as low as 5% per week. Think about it; if you are benching 150, should you really try to go up to 165 next week? Maybe more importantly, if you're already a beast and way up at 300, do you think it's reasonable to shoot for 330 when you were struggling with 300 only a week ago? Starting Strength which is a really popular and well regarded strength training program recommends adding 5lbs a week to each major lift in their program. I am a big fan of this approach for as long as it remains effective. It may not sound like a lot, but if you are consistent you can go from squatting 185 to 315 in about sixth months. That's really not so bad. 

-Variety- This is where true periodization really comes into play. If you are doing the same rep scheme and the same exercises day in day out for several months you are putting your body under basically the same stress in the same patterns. Not only will this hinder your progress as your body becomes more efficient and you hit a plateau, but it is basically the exact formula for an overuse injury. You're doing the exactly the same sh*t over and over. Stop it, now. This doesn't mean you can't hit the same exercises with a high frequency, they just can't be exactly the same. I squat 2-3 times a week, but I rotate between front, back and overhead squats so I almost never hit the same variation twice in the same week. Most core lifts have similar variations (think rows, presses, lunges, deadlifts, etc.)

In terms of training for a specific sport, you may not have as much freedom with this particular rule. There may be movements that are prioritized in your training as a result of the sport you're training for. This is understandable and can still be done safely but extra care should be paid to the athlete during the lifts. Pain, inflammation or discomfort that may be insignificant in other scenarios should be given priority because the athlete is not getting as much time to recover.

This is also where cross training is really important. Spending too much time with a single set of movement patterns makes you strong in all of the related muscle groups. If those are the only groups you focus on you can end up with muscular imbalances. Guess what those do? It's probably got something to do with improper movement patterns and injury. Just..guessing...

-Proper Recovery- Take some time off now and then. If you are in the gym every single day you are f*cking up, unless two or three of those days are very light, active recovery days. Don't do more than one max per week, regardless of the body parts. This can lead to nervous system fatigue - your muscles may be recovered but your nervous system is harder to gauge. When your nervous system isn't firing efficiently it can lead to -yep, you guessed it- improper movement and injury. 

There's a couple of different ways you can monitor nervous system fatigue but one of the simplest, cheapest and best guidelines I've come across is using your resting heart rate. Start taking it in the morning at around the same time when you wake up. Keep a record so you can establish an average value. If you wake up and your heart rate is significantly higher than normal (eliminating all confounding factors such as medication, alcohol, sleep deprivation etc.) then it is likely your nervous system still has not recovered completely. 

Once you are a fairly well trained individual you might be able to max more than once a week without significant CNS fatigue, but unless you're a competitive powerlifter or olympic lifter there really isn't much reason to. 

-Movement Selection- I touched on this a little bit when I mentioned cross training above. Movement selection is important for a number of reasons, sport specificity and functionality being two of the biggest. It is also incredibly important in terms of injury prevention. Unfortunately it's also something that I can give nothing other than a broad overview of in this post. If you are a healthy individual with no outstanding injuries or anatomical curiosities then most movements are acceptable. You may need to work on your flexibility and mobility in certain joints in order to hit the movement properly, but that's no big deal. I had quite a bit of work in hip flexibility and thoracic extension in order to squat properly and honestly most people do. It's ok. What I'm talking about here is modifying exercises for people who are injured or the structure of their body is different in some way. Some stuff is simple, if you have hardcore scoliosis you probably shouldn't do heavy deadlifts, but that's not what I'm talking about. More than anything the main point of this is that you should be cleared for all movements by a qualified professional before attempting them. I know that's annoying, but I guarantee you it's nowhere near as annoying as having to swap your workouts for physical therapy sessions 3 times a week. 

-Don't do stupid sh*t- This is one that I think a lot of people straight up miss out on. I don't give a sh*t what your trainer told you and I couldn't care less what your bootcamp instructor said. It's not that there aren't qualified professionals out there it's that if you are doing these things and your defense is someone told you it's ok then that person is an idiot and you should be smacked for swallowing their bullshit. So, how do you know if you're doing stupid shit? It's pretty simple. I'm gonna get Jeff Foxworthy on this b*tch.

Does your exercise have a name that's more than two words? Then you're probably doing some stupid shit.

Example: Single leg kettle bell deadlift to press on a bosu. Individually a lot of this stuff is good. Single leg- good, kettle bell - good, deadliest-awesome, press-fantastic! Now why the f*ck do you need to do them all at once? You're not being efficient. You're not creating or emulating a beneficial pattern. You are too unstable to get the maximum benefits of any individual exercise and you're wasting everyones time. Stop. Now.

Does your exercise involve more than a single piece of equipment? Then you're definitely doing some stupid shit.

You can get sick fit with just your own bodyweight, doubly so with just a barbell and a squat rack. If you are holding one kind of weight in one hand, a different in the other while standing on something, you're f*cking up. Badly. 

Does your exercise have a straightforward purpose that can be explained in a sentence or two? If not, you're doing some stupid shit.

Take the single leg kettle bell deadlift to press. What the f*ck is the purpose of that? "well single leg improves balance" Sure, but you can just stand on one leg. In fact there's a growing body of evidence that standing on destabilized surfaces only increases your ability to stabilize yourself on an UNSTABLE SURFACE. In other words, unless you plan on living your life standing on a boss, it's probably not doing much for your functional fitness level. Why do you have to do all that other stuff with it? You don't and you shouldn't. Exercises should be specific to their goals and they should not, in most cases, be blended. 

Did you get your workout routine from a magazine with a glossy cover? Then you, my friend, have f*cked up and you are the current king of stupid sh*t. I used to read a lot of Men's Health back in the day and the reality is that from time to time they did have some solid information. The problem is that their main motivation is not your health, it's selling articles. They have a monetary incentive to keep providing you with new, interesting, exciting information and workouts pretty much irrespective of their level of bullsh*t. It's not so much that these magazines have nothing to offer, but you should understand their place in the hierarchy of things. Basing your entire workout around an article you read in Muscle & Fiction magazine is like basing your entire financial life around an article you read in Entrepreneur. Would you do that? Please say no.

4) Understand Pain - I think these days too many of us have the attitude that we should work through pain. In the interest of embracing the suck, I would frequently agree. In the realm of injury prevention, however, there are certain types of pain that are glaring red flags and should signal the end of a workout or at the very least the end of a particular exercise if the pain does not go away. They are:

-Sharp, Stabbing Pain- I'm not talking about the kind of deep burn you get in your muscles when you're Anchorman-ing your way through your 1000th rep. I'm talking about feeling like someone just stuck a f*cking knife into you. If you feel pain this intense, stop what you're doing.

-Numbness - If you feel some type of pain followed by persistent numbness, stop. This could be an indicator of some type of nerve damage or nervous system malfunction.

-Burning - Again, I'm not talking about that deep burn. If you have a sensation that feels like someone just put a soldering iron up to your skin, stop. This is also typically an indicator of some type of nervous system damage/involvement. The same goes for tingling or a cold/wet feeling that has nothing to do with the presence of something cold or wet. 

When i set out to write this post about six hours ago I was originally going to include some stuff on proper recovery because recovery and injury prevention are pretty inescapably intertwined. Recovery is going to have to wait until tomorrow because it's almost 9:30 and I still need to hit the gym myself. The reason I dropped this picture of my buddy Maximus here is this: The truth is that injury prevention is incredibly simple. Warm up properly, progress in a measured, intelligent manner and don't do anything really f*cking stupid. It really is that simple. The problem is that no one f*cking does it. Warming up and progressing slowly isn't exciting and in your face. It's tedious and so most people just skip it altogether because who gives a f*ck if you can walk when you're fifty if you're pretty at 30? Am I right guys? Guys...?

If you're looking for a magical set of exercises that will make your body bulletproof there isn't one, well, not exactly. All of my talk about movement patterns? That's how you become invincible. Developing healthy, proper movement patterns will improve performance and prevent injury. Obviously some of us need help with those patterns. Without doing an in person evaluation it's really difficult and frankly unprofessional to prescribe corrective exercises. 

That being said, if you're anything like the average American you probably have tight hips, tight shoulders and sh*tty posture. It's cool. Happens to the best of us. If I get enough responses I'll try to do a work up of some basic exercises to combat those really common problems. Check back tomorrow for an equally intense post on proper recovery and how recovery can help prevent injury. Until then, do yourself a favor and check out mobilitywod.com. You can use the search function there to find mobilization and rehabilitation exercises for pretty much every joint in your body. I will warn you, a lot of them are pretty painful but all the ones I've tried (particularly the thoracic vertebrae mobilization with lacrosse balls) are very effective.

Until next time guys and dolls. Good luck and good lifting.

Cheers.

Todays Workout:

Dynamic Warm-Up 10-15min

Met Con Circuit

400m run

3 Pull Ups

6 Burpees 

9 Dips

12 Kettlebell Swings (24kg)

15 Squats

 4 rounds for time