Injuries and Form

My bedroom workout setup.

Injuries are a fact of an active life. Whether from accidents, poor posture, repetitive use, or exerting oneself too much, injuries get in the way of further exercise, leaving muscles weaker and withering away. Most of the last two years I have spent battling injuries. This led me to re-evaluate my approach. Rather than focus on running speed or weights lifted, I need to understand my body better and build around it. Something I am just realizing is that the workouts and routines you find in books are usually aimed at neutral people who are in reasonable shape and mechanically balanced. The same routines may not necessarily work for you if you are starting from a baseline of injury and imbalance. Instead, they need to be customized to fit your needs and your body, which requires first knowing your body.

Last week I did a tour of my body with fairly light 15 lb. dumbbells. I felt much soreness in my neck, upper left arm, left hip and lower back, and right knee. A chiropractor adjustment took care of the right knee and back pains. The rest of the pain persisted, indicating it was muscular. A few weeks ago I had taken a long road trip during which I spent many hours in a car and many more sleeping on hotel beds. I came back home with the right knee pain and a misalignment in my middle back. The middle back forced my shoulder to arch forward, putting additional stresses on my left arm. The 15 lb. I was pressing felt like 50 lb., hurting my muscles.

Following the book Anatomy for Runners, by Jay DicHarry, I performed an assessment of my running mobility. The tests revealed weak glutes and over-tight hip flexors, the result of years of sitting down in front of computers. Those limit the range by which I can extend my legs backwards, hurting my efficiency and putting additional impact on my joints and quads. Hence my chronic hip pain. I can see the limited mobility of my hip flexors when I perform yoga poses like the Bridge. The solution is to perform lunges to stretch the front of my hips.  I also learned that I had been doing squats the wrong way all along. My shins need to stay roughly vertical and not lean forward too much, straining my knees. To do that, I need to engage my glutes to relieve pressure from my quads. Hence, the fact that I was doing squats wrong, often with weights, helped contribute to my injuries.

Daily yoga sessions this week with focus on stretching tight areas and strengthening weaker areas helped alleviate much of the pain in my hips and upper arm. Today I did triceps extension, with weights, and no pain. My neck is also improving but needs more time. 

I am now in the process of re-focusing my exercise plan to avoid such injuries.  Here's how:

1. Posture.  Even if you exercise 3 hours a day, that's only 1/8th of your time. You spend the other 7/8th sitting, driving, or sleeping. Bad posture over prolonged periods of time will leave its mark on your body. Further, imbalanced posture while climbing up and down stairs can lead to injurious falls, something I have experienced repeatedly, until I realized it has much to do with my slightly hunched posture shifting my center of gravity too far. A key element of my injury recovery and prevention plan is therefore to pay attention to my posture outside of exercise.
2. Form. Form is dynamic posture, a series of poses that change as we work out. Improper form when carrying weights or impacting the ground while running can put much more stress on the body than the static form outside of exercise. I slowed down my running pace and dropped weights to a bare minimum so as to focus on correct form before pushing ahead. Trying to establish form with heavier weights from the start is difficult and can lead to injuries. I need to train myself to exercise in correct form. Today, for example, I did sets of squats, lunges, and standing calf raises without any weights at all. My target was engaging the correct muscles and maintaining proper form throughout. A mirror helped. Similarly, I intend to focus on proper form in yoga and any other exercise I do.
3. Recovery.  Recovery is an important part of exercise. Muscles need time to rebuild and grow. Recovery days need not be sedentary.  In fact I rotate workouts so I do yoga or weight training in between runs. Giving the body time to heal is especially important when injuries are present. For example, given my neck and upper arm pain for the last two weeks, I dropped shrugs from my weight routine and eased off on presses and shoulder exercises for my left side. I continue to train other parts of my body that were not affected. I use pain as my guide to tell me where to ease off.
4. Identify weaknesses and address them. A key to prevention is to understand the causes of specific injuries, which often lie in imbalances in our bodies, as the self-assessments I describe above have revealed to me. One thing I noticed is my tendency to overuse the left leg when running.  I can especially feel it in my glutes, where my left glute is too tight while my right is almost non-existent. I suspect this situation was created by the chronic pain I had in my right knee a few years ago, which led me to rely more on my left leg and reduce impact on my right leg. This needs to change. I therefore plan to focus on better balancing my body, making sure muscles are symmetric in strength.
5. Foam Rolling.  Foam rolling is a way of deep tissue massage that will break down knots and help the body recover into a stronger form.  From experience, I noticed that I get injured the least when I foam roll frequently, and vice-versa. I will write more on this later.