Lifting Weights With Injury Prevention In Mind

The workout routines I've used and prefer bounce between bodybuilding (hypertrophy) and strength training. I found more fun in strength training because you use heavier weights, break records, and your nervous system seems to fire better, allowing you maximum strength more frequently throughout your days. The downside to strength training ironically is that it works, and thus your strength never stops going up, but at some point your body can't handle the stress, and ultimately gets injured.

In strength training I honed my form pretty well in the three main lifts - Bench Press, Squat, and Deadlift, but I also elevated their importance too much. I did routines that only had those lifts, and I thought if I put all of my energy into one thing it would improve, but I found too much resistance. Three lifts don't make a workout routine, and won't shape your body that aesthetically.

In my training, I ended up injured through Deadlifts by wearing wrist straps and continuing to pull the weight despite pain or lack of energy. The wrist straps hadn't failed me before - even with twice the weight, but a single set seemed to rip apart my left wrist, and my left elbow, and left ankle. It taught me valuable lessons. For someone who regularly lifts, their body is probably never 100% healed. But if you keep too low a recovery you won't have access to your full strength, and your body will continue to get weaker.

Sometimes the trick to a more recovered body is to just cut days from lifting so that you lift less days. This can fail to work too though if you have injuries popping up despite being well-rested. This is where I was for a bit, working out once a week, but I've learned to bandage myself up more, which has solved many problems, but I can tell that in the future I will need more and more types of bandages for body parts.

My working solution right now is wrist wraps, elbow sleeve, and ankle sleeves. I use athletic tape for the highest knuckle on each finger, and tape on each wrist. The wraps and sleeves provide compression, which seems to keep joints warmer and limits your range of motion to prevent ranges of motion that would injure you. The tape on the fingers is more about preventing pain and enabling my grip to last longer in both the workout, and in workouts that occur days later. I know that when I've done routines with say 6 days of working out, my hands become what I call shredded. They get red, sore to the touch, and I don't feel my grip is there. The tape eliminates all of that - although with 6 workout days a week, I would have to up my hand maintenance by using a balm and a pumice stone.

The ankle sleeves are my newest addition, and oddly I don't feel ankle pain during workouts. The pain is more typically felt at the end of days (rest days as well), and by using the ankle sleeves, that pain has diminished. I think the next thing for me may be knee sleeves, but I'm going to wait until that's a more pressing issue.

I'm almost surprised that my right wrist and right elbow are holding up, but I am using the same cautionary measures on my right wrist that I am with the left. I'm not exactly sure how you would take care of a shoulder in this situation. Perhaps some form of compression (probably something more like the Sling Shot would work more realistically than a standard compression t-shirt with sleeves - good luck trying to take off a tight compression t-shirt - I nearly died once from that at 4am in the ocean). My shoulders do seem to go what I call 'offline' from time to time, but I've been able to prevent that by limiting the total amount of reps on shoulder exercises like bench pressing and overhead pressing, and by using a suitable amount of weight.

Current Training Program - 2015 Success

I've completed my 13th week on GZCL method. My squat has gone up 20lb, and shows no sign of plateauing. My Deadlift has gone up 15lb. The reason it's lower than the squat is that I played around with sumo for a few weeks, and generally didn't take it as seriously as the squats. My Deadlift PR is practically 200lb over my Squat PR, so I find Deadlifts generally easy for myself. The amount of weight I'm lifting is based off a training PR and not my actual PR. This is to ensure progress and keep momentum, and is obviously easier to recover from.

I am doing accessory lifts on odd days throughout the weeks.  I think GZCL works best for my squats. For Deadlifts, I seem to be preserving my strength, but not excelling as much. I am using a lower weight for my training PR b/c I want to avoid any hitching and encourage better technique. I'm more interesting these days in getting reps on weight rather than just doing heavy singles. I found heavy singles ultimately to be extremely punishing on the body and psych (when failing too often), and makes your body more prone to injury.

I find the days in the gym where I am strongest and the lifts take the least effort are the days that the day prior I had good adequate nutrition both macro/total caloric amount-wise. I've been walking 1.5 miles a few days out of the week. I've started doing weighted pull-ups and shrugs again. There's a new row I do with a barbell. It can be seen here.

I think I could be doing more work to better my fitness and body. I think I lack hypertrophy work, more skill work, and machine work. There's always room for improvement.