How you get hurt even when you do everything right

How did you get hurt if you are active and have decent tolerance for positions?

Here is an inevitable question you will encounter if you are someone who gets hurt after investing a reasonable amount of time and energy into being a healthy person who strength trains.

The truth is shit happens. Even after the best preparation, volume management and building tolerance for positions you can hurt yourself. It happens to the best and most gifted of athletes. Granted their volume and intensity of activity might be much higher. And their protocols for rest and recovery will put an average Joe like me to shame.

My point being, you train a skill. You build capacity. You execute well. Until shit happens.

Too much volume. Too little recovery. Too much fatigue. An awkward position. A bad landing. Too much accumulated damage and fatigue. There are many reasons one gets hurt.

A muscle can protest. But tendons and ligaments tear without warning or alarm.

There are many reasons for this.

Tendons have much less blood supply than muscles. They take much longer to remodel, recover, adapt and stiffen.

Muscles can get really sore. Movement can feel inhibited. There are degrees to which they can strain before they tear. There are clear signals when you are stressing a muscle out.

But not for tendons. You can have tendinopathy. A condition that leaves your tendon feeling inflamed and painful.

But a tear in a tendon is not something you can see coming. And between the complex physical properties (twisted and asymmetric bundles that are not loaded evenly under load) of a tendon, you really are at the mercy of stopping at the right time or before the wrong rep. And you have no clue when that is or which rep it will happen to be.

My personal case. I did the same pogos I’ve demoed 1000’s of times. Over 12 inch hurdles. While covering distance. As my teammate joked, I’ve seen you do drop landings from 7.5 feet high boxes, how the hell did a pogo do this?

That’s the nature of creep fatigue of a tendon. You can tell when you are pushing the elastic limits of the tendon. It’s doing its job quite well one moment. Next moment it’s in two pieces.

My takeaway from this? Limit demo reps to 6-10 reps an hour. Maybe I should have factored for having packed on 5-6 kgs of weight in the last year (most of it good)? I can’t really tell. But all I know is it’s non-negotiable to try and work back to the capacities I had. So I pick patterns or setup in ways that allow me to bypass the tendon. And when I do load the foot, it is within the safe confines of a boot.

Pragmatic positivity is the name of the game. I scale movement gently factoring for the tendon being the weakest link. It has poor blood supply. And takes the longest time to lay down new tissue and become more robust at the task of passing on force from muscles to joints.