If you haven't read part 1, click here

If you are involved in any kind of sport, you are going to get hurt. It just comes with the territory. One of my biggest struggles in training, especially as I was exiting my 20s, was how to rebuild myself after an injury. See, when I decided I was good to go and train again, I would go hard. I was always in a huge rush to get back to my old self again. If I wasn’t miserably sore the following training, I was dissatisfied with my efforts. Don’t get me wrong, it is important to have hard training days. Pushing oneself to the edge has a lot of value in it, but it isn’t the way to bounce back from an injury. I am impatient with myself. I wanted my old conditioning back and I wanted it back yesterday. These recent, consecutive, and long lasting injuries gave me a kick in the butt. Maybe I should be patient. Maybe I should go easy… Maybe I should practice what I preach since I advise my students to pace themselves.

Let’s talk about pull-ups. I hate pull-ups. I am a short, stocky guy and pull-ups and I never mixed well. With that said, prior to my shoulder sprain, I could tolerate 12 reps in a row. For the first 8 weeks of my injury, I physically couldn’t do a single rep. I couldn’t even hang from the bar. By the time the shoulder was feeling ‘good’ I could only do 2... These were sad times. I went back to weight lifting and started trying to build up my strength. When I was finally feeling strong enough to try again, I could only bust out  5.

Eager to rebuild, the old me would have gone right to doing 4-5 sets of these. I would have wanted to push it, so that when I lifted up my water bottle, my hand would shake. There were a lot of problems with this approach. For one, I would be so sore that it would make training and teaching miserable for days. Everything I would do had a nice layer of discomfort over it. Also, I was limited as I really wouldn’t be able to do any more pull-ups for days afterwards.  I was just too darn sore. Plus, I put myself at risk for hurting myself again. Training with fatigue is a really good way to re-injured yourself. So, learning from my mistakes, I decide to try the following: I would start by doing 5 pull-ups, just the one set, 4-5 days a week. It wasn’t terribly hard, I wasn’t terribly sore, and it was sustainable. The next week I did 6 a day. The following I upped it to 7. This week I am back to 10. If there was a day that I was especially tired, I would take it off. There was always tomorrow. I just stayed consistent.

I started applying this method to anything that was feeling weak from injuries. Since my back was still recovering, I didn’t give myself a dedicated back day. Instead I would work out my back 3 days a week and kept it easy. My core was also very weak, so I started to hit a little bit of ab work each day with no need to overdo it. Last week I started getting back into running. I didn’t need to do 9 miles week one to jump-start my shin splints; I can take it easy.
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See, I haven’t had any terrible, life-altering injuries. I have been really lucky. Instead, I have many small, common injuries that I have been too stubborn to let myself recover properly. People reading this have probably made the same mistakes as me. Take it from an experienced overdoer that you need to ease back into things. Listen to your body. If it tells you to rest, then rest. The human body can recover in some amazing ways, but it needs your support. Almost everything I like to do for fun is physical, and it is frustrating being on the bench. I have learned that pacing myself is the fastest way to get back to doing what I love and the best way to keep doing it.

If it isn’t one thing, it’s another. After managing to stay alive for 3 decades, my body decided to throw a little bit of a tantrum. The culprit was most likely my recurring complacency with warming up. Sometimes, I wouldn’t warm up at all. Other times, I would warm up, take a 30-minute break between lessons, and then get back to work cold. What was the consequence?

First, I managed to sprain my left shoulder just a couple of weeks before my 30th birthday. It wasn’t pleasant. I couldn’t lift my arm above my rib cage, couldn’t carry more than a pound of weight, and I was told it could be a 3-month recovery time. I lost a lot of strength as I impatiently waited for time to pass. I made many visits to my chiropractor who hooked me up to the TENS unit (transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation), trying to loosen up some of the stressed muscles around my shoulder blade and neck. I did some yoga, complained, and counted the days. Eventually, enough time had passed that I was able to do some strength training. Soon after, I was doing some light sparring. Things were really looking up.

Then, things took a bad turn. I was demonstrating a takedown on a fairly large person. This was a move I had done live and shown many times. It was cold that night and I had just spent an hour sitting in my office chair. The second I lifted his large leg I felt a twinge in my lower back. It was as if a small cluster of nerves twisted up in a little circle just right of my spine. “It wasn’t a big deal,” I thought to myself. I barely felt it. The next morning I woke up with a very stiff lower and middle back. Throughout the day it worsened. It would get especially upset if I was sitting or standing for more than 10 minutes at a time. I later discovered I couldn’t really engage my core and, if I was lying down, I couldn’t lift my feet from the ground without that small cluster of nerves yelling at me. 

This injury was not as bad as the shoulder and I was grateful. After two weeks I could lift weights and do some stand-up fighting. After three weeks I was able to go rock climbing with only minimal discomfort. Still, I couldn’t do much core work and therefore couldn’t practice jiu jitsu. If I tried, my back would seize up for the remainder of the day. My BJJ purple belt continued to collect dust.

After talking to my BJJ instructor and partner, Andrew Kuiland, and a couple of other wise individuals, I decided it was time to make a change. If I was going to continue living my life the way I wanted, I needed to start taking care of my body. So, I made a plan…

To be continued