Injuries in strength training: how you should deal with them!

In strength training, injuries are, to put it mildly, simply frustrating. One moment you're pushing through your programme, hitting new milestones every week, only to suddenly find yourself unable to train properly for weeks.

Especially when you train intensely, injuries can never be avoided 100%. So it's important to know how to prevent injuries, and even more important, how to handle them the right way. Because besides the physical pain of an injury, a break like this from training also has a psychological impact for some people.

These are the topics I want to cover in today's blog article. Stay tuned for more!

How can injuries be prevented?

Let's start with this topic and look at preventive measures. Because ideally, we don't want to let it get to the point of getting injured in the first place. Now I could just say: don't train with heavy weights and you'll prevent injuries in most cases! And of course, you shouldn't train with a weight that's far too heavy for you.

But since in strength training we're always trying to progress, we end up working with weights that are heavy for us, or cranking up the number of reps and thus the intensity, to achieve muscle growth. And that's exactly where the risk of injury often lies.

So what do I recommend preventively? The following:

1. Warm up: your muscles and joints should be warmed up. Before training, remember to do your warm-up exercises and a few warm-up sets for each exercise. That way you ease safely into your working set.
2. Correct execution: training intensely doesn't mean you're allowed to train incorrectly. If the weight is so heavy that you can no longer perform the exercise correctly, it's too heavy. That way you risk unnecessary injuries that don't even need to happen. Because with incorrect execution, you don't even properly target the muscle, which also prevents muscle growth. So: put your ego aside and push through the exercise with high intensity and correct execution.
3. Recovery: too much training can hurt you. Make sure you recover after training and get enough sleep. That way you increase your body's overall resilience.

How to deal with injuries?

Now maybe it's happened anyway and you've gotten injured. What now? In the following paragraphs, I want to give you my advice on how best to handle an injury.

Acceptance

The first step is: accept that you have an injury. That might sound strange, but I've made this mistake too. You feel the pain and think "Ah, it's not that bad!" Then you go train anyway and just delay the healing process.

So don't make this mistake, and accept that your body needs to recover from injuries.

Recovery

Which brings us to the next step: support your body's recovery. What do I mean by that? Give the affected area rest. That means you either need to stop training completely, or at least take the load off the affected area.

Recovery is an important part of this. It shouldn't be neglected.

Physiotherapy

An injury can be minor, meaning you only need to stop training for a while. But it can also be serious, meaning you might need physiotherapy or other treatment.

At this step, it's necessary to see a doctor. Even if you think it's just a minor injury, you should still play it safe. Your health should come first for you, not your pride or your muscles.

Nutrition

Nutrition plays an important role in recovery. Here too I can give you some tips. What matters in the healing process is getting enough vitamins and minerals. A balanced diet helps your body carry out recovery optimally.

Psychological aspects

Finally, I want to emphasise once more that injuries should be taken seriously. I fully understand that a break from sport can be a psychological burden, especially when you live for strength training. I'm speaking from my own experience here, and I can say that I understand anyone with an injury who still wants to go train.

Still, I want to make one thing clear: health is more important than the small amount of muscle mass you MIGHT lose. And even if you do lose some muscle mass after a few weeks off, you can easily build it back up thanks to the nice thing called "muscle memory."

So no matter how frustrated you are about the injury, prioritise your recovery.

Conclusion

And with that, we've reached the end. I hope I could give you some useful information in this blog article on how to best handle, and how you should handle, injuries.