BACK INJURIES & CROSSFIT
“If you have a fear of exercising because of injuries, I can assure you that not exercising will leave you in far worst condition”
Injuries are not fun for anyone, especially back injuries. When you are hurt, it definitely makes you feel vulnerable. Your inability to tie your shoes, or move around quickly and freely, the constant search for a comfortable position so you can finally relax.
Been there, done that. It is not fun and I do not wish it upon anyone.
Some experts predict that 8 out of 10 Americans will experience back pain at some point in their life. All coming from different walks of life but the statistics seem to be fairly accurate with athletes.
How are injuries measured?
Injuries in sport are measured on a per 1000 hour basis. Researchers will follow all sports and record the results of how many injuries an athlete will get based on 1000 hours of total activity. An example would be soccer players who can sustain upwards of 35 injuries/1000 hours of competitive soccer. As opposed to Olympic Weightlifting which is roughly 2.4-3.3 injuries/1000 hour.
Where does CrossFit Stand?
CrossFit is about 2.1-3.1 injuries/1000 hours of training. With the most common injury being around the shoulder and second most injured area the lower back.
How do we Get Hurt?
To sum it up quickly, we get hurt when the load demanded on our body exceeds its capacity. You can imagine a cup as your capacity - and everything you do in your day to day life can add and take away from your cup.
For the sake of this example, lets see how an injury can occur. If you don’t sleep well, then your cup gets filled a bit. Now you have stress at work, fill it up some more. You’ve been dealing with a tight hip from sitting down all week, ok lets fill it up some more. Now all of a sudden you get to the gym and you are asked to find a 3 rep max deadlift. By this point pushing to a true 3 rep max deadlift might overflow your cup which results in…you guessed it, some sort of injury. These can be acute (short term) or if you ignore it for a longer period of time, it could lead to a chronic injury.
How can I avoid this?
You would have noticed above that your cup can get filled with things like: not sleeping well, or an increase in stress etc…How can you buy yourself enough capacity so you can handle the demands of your life?
By doing the simple, but unfortunately not easy things like: aiming to get 7-9 hours of sleep each night, eating enough to supplement your lifestyle. Managing stress and YES, managing workout loads and intensity.
More often than not, I have found that through experience, people tend to hurt their back when the demands on their body has increased.
Here’s an example:
We had a member last year who came to me a bit puzzled as to why they felt their back was “tired” and “tweaked” more often than not. It is often easy to just assume technique might be off but they have been a long standing member.
I decided to ask more questions: have you changed anything at home with activity levels?
After some thought, they ended telling me that they started to run three times a week on top of the classes they have been doing at the gym. This extra volume and impact on the body inevitably makes it a little bit harder to recover! Running utilizes muscle groups used in the deadlift and therefore, a little more effort is needed to move similar loads. If the body doesn’t have the capacity for that then guess what happens? Opportunity for an injury or tweak may occur.
Improve Capacity& Manage Load
Ok, so how can you do more fitness and avoid injury? Manage your training load and allow you body to recover.
What I told this particular person was to dial back the volume a little bit, bring the weights down and then slowly increase back up as the body learns to adapt. When the body adapts (of course with good nutrition, sleep and hydration) the overall capacity goes up and therefore you can place more load on the body!
Think about how sore you were when you first started exercising from just some regular air squats. Today you might do 100 reps with loads and not feel too bad - that is because your capacity has gone up and you can handle more load.
So, if you currently have a back injury right now - my suggestion is to take a few days, and protect the area and allow the body to do its job. Now don’t rest too long because movement is needed to help heal. Going on walks and doing some light stretching at the hips can be fairly useful aswell.
From there, you actually want to go back into the gym and manage three things:
1 - Load (this is weight on the bar or exercise): you want to make this light enough that you feel you can manage pain within a reasonable and tolerable amount.
2 - Volume (amount of work being done): you want to limit how many reps you do at first. If you normally do a total of 80 deadlifts in a session, its potentially best to start off with less reps as we re-expose your body to that range of motion.
3 - Range of motion (how far the joint travels): for Deadlifts for example; if you are having trouble tieing your shoes, then deadlift to the ground might not be wise. Instead you can set a platform up where the load is only being traveled to your knees and slowly increase the range of motion over time.
Injuries can be scary - but they are a normal part of life unfortunately. It is important to be optimistic about our recovery and understand that our bodies are really resilient and good at bouncing back if we allow them too.
For now, keep training smart, and build that capacity!
Coach Nani