Rest is Not the Answer:
In any sport or exercise regiment you choose to take part in, there will always be a risk for injury to occur. Sometimes these things happen because of ego lifting, sometimes they come from poor technique and sometimes s**t just happens for no reason at all. Regardless, pain sucks! It can derail your healthy lifestyle and keep you from reaching your goals.
This doesn’t have to happen though. There are several ways that you can modify your training in order to keep active while allowing your injury to recover. Some professionals will simply say “just don’t do that.” That’s not good enough anymore. Science has shown repeatedly that absolute rest during an injury is one of the last things you want to do.
There is such a thing as “safe pain.” By that I mean, a level of pain that is not considered dangerous to the tissue. A general rule of thumb to go by is to try to keep your pain levels to 4/10 or less during activity and to avoid anything that brings it up above that number. We can accomplish that by playing around with 5 factors.
Five Modifiable Factors:
Example of ways to modify range of motion
Range of Motion
This has to do with how much total motion is occurring.
Keep it simple. If it hurts to squat to full depth, than try to find a depth that doesn’t hurt. If it hurts to do vertical pulling, try horizontal pulling.
Less motion, less strain on the tissue.
Speed / Tempo
This refers to the speed of the movement you are performing.
In general, the faster or more explosive the movement, the more strain on the tissue.
Instead of a split jerk, try a push press. Instead of normal speed squats, try slow tempo squats at a lower load. Kipping pullups hurt? Bust out a band and do some strict for a while.
Load
This refers to how much weight you are moving.
A good strategy would be to try and find a threshold for weights that cause you pain and try to stay under those thresholds.
Volume
Volume management is huge. Most injuries in CrossFit, for example, are overuse injuries.
For some pain cases, their pain starts happening after fatigue sets in. For example, you may feel fine for the first couple miles of your run, but start hurting after mile three every time.
Type of Contraction
This refers to what kind of muscle contraction you are doing.
Concentric muscle contractions can be aggravating, for example, but you may be able to tolerate eccentric muscle contractions.
An example would be if you have pain with full ring dips, but you are able to perform pieces of it without pain, such as the support hold or lowering down into the dip.
Summary:
You should always try to change HOW you are doing something, before you change the activity altogether. Most pain complaints can be changed almost immediately if you can change these five factors around a bit. However, if you have been dealing with pain for over a few weeks and it’s not getting better, it’s time to get yourself checked out.