The Gift of Injury
Sometimes, an injury can be a blessing is disguise because it forces you to correct things that you wouldn't have noticed otherwise.
At San Diego Athletics we’ve got choices. On any day, we can choose from three different programs: fitness, bodybuilding, and CrossFit.
I have no interest in competitive CrossFit, so I’ve mostly been following the fitness programming. I know it’s the best thing for my goal of lifelong fitness and health. However, sometimes the CrossFit workouts look like fun—that crazy, bring-you-to-your-knees version of fun. I also missed the technique involved in Olympic lifts, so in late November I decided to jump back in.
I did my first CrossFit workout on a Wednesday at 8am. I did it by myself—everyone else in the class was doing fitness or bodybuilding—so I went slowly. I took it easy on the snatches, and didn’t push myself too hard on the workout that included overhead squats and pull-ups.
Thursday I surfed, and then in the Friday noon class I jumped into CrossFit again, this time with about four other women.
We started off with a complex that included front squats, push presses, push jerks, and split jerks. My back was a little sore from back squatting on Monday, but I tried to put that out of my mind. It was fun to slowly increase the weight, to feel that slight sense of anxiety as the bar got heavier.
“This is so much fun!” I said to nobody in particular after finishing the complex.
Then it was time for the workout. There was nothing in it that was particularly intimidating: a 200 meter run, 10 wall balls, 8 reverse burpees, 10 hang squat cleans at 65-lb., and then max reps of handstand push-ups. The issue was time: we had three minutes to get to the handstand push-ups, and we had to repeat this four times, with a two minute break in between.
Everything was going well until I got to the 10 hang squat cleans. I picked up the bar, cleaned the weight and as I dropped into a squat I felt a sharp, sudden pain across the length of my lower back. I was desperate to get to the handstand push-ups, so I ignored the warning signals coming from my back. There’s so much sensory overload during a workout—the loud music, your own heavy breathing, the clang of barbells, the feeling of fatigue flooding your muscles—sometimes it’s hard to evaluate the severity of an injury mid-workout.
I finished the squat cleans and kicked up to the wall. When I pressed out of my first handstand push-up I knew something was wrong. I dropped to feet and stood, confused, waiting out the remaining seconds until the clock reached three minutes.
In the two-minute break I walked around the gym, trying to figure out what to do. As my heart rate calmed down, the pain increased. I had trouble standing up straight. I’d never quit in the middle of the workout. Maybe if I started moving, it would feel better, I thought.
Two minutes passed, and unsure what else to do, I started to run out the door. As I ran down the sidewalk, my body felt like it was made out of ill-fitting parts. Nothing seemed work the way it should. The most I could manage was a slow shuffle. That’s when I knew something was really wrong. I stopped and walked back into the gym.
From there, the pain just got worse. I rolled around with the foam roller while the rest of the class finished the workout, but nothing helped. Every movement sent a pain shooting through my back. Getting up off the floor was suddenly a multi-step process.
Coincidentally, I had scheduled a short session with Theresa Larson, our in-house physical therapist and mobility specialist, so I went upstairs and she put me on her table.
“It’s just a muscle strain,” she said. “You need to figure out how to engage your glutes.” She told me my back was taking too much of the load when I handled any weight.
I thought about the back squats on Monday, and the heavy complex before the workout. I imagined my back taking the brunt of that weight, and winced.
By the time I got home in the late afternoon, after picking the kids up from school and taking my son to his swim lesson, the pain had increased to an alarming level. It hurt to sit, stand, and lie down. I contemplated figuring out a way to hang from the ceiling, but instead just wandered around the house, moaning.
After a rough night’s sleep, I woke up in the same situation. Knowing that sitting or lying down is the worst thing for a back injury, I took a few long walks and swallowed some ibuprofen. By the end of the day on Saturday I was starting to see some improvement. On Sunday my back still hurt, but I could sit and stand without severe pain.
I took it easy for a week at the gym, and over the Thanksgiving weekend just went for an easy jog. Finally, 10 days after the injury, I decided to try back squatting.
Remembering what Theresa had told me, and desperate to avoid another injury, I focused all my attention on using my glutes. The first light set felt great—smooth and strong. I increased the weight, moving up to a moderately heavy set. As I finished my second-to-last set of five, Paula walked by, watching.
As with almost every coach who has ever watched me squat, Paula has tried to fix my form. No matter what I’ve tried, who I’ve listened to, how many times I’ve dropped the weights to work on my form, when the weight starts to get heavy, my knees come in.
Except this time.
“That was perfect!” Paula said as I racked the bar. In the five years I’ve been doing CrossFit, I think that’s the first time someone has said my squat was perfect.
In all the years I’ve tried to prevent my knees from coming in out of the bottom of the squat, I had no idea the problem originated in my glutes. Or maybe I thought I was engaging my glutes, but had never really understood what that actually felt like.
It took the fear of injury, and the memory of that awful pain, to finally get my body moving correctly.
Paula was so excited she insisted on taking a video of my last set. She showed me how she could see my glutes engaging as I came up out of the squat.
I didn’t need a video to show me what I could feel for myself. For the first time—ever—I felt solid and strong while squatting, instead of weak and wobbly.
A week later, Justin watched me squat.
“Perfect,” he said.
Once I had felt the right way to squat, there was no turning my back. I understood, finally, what it meant to squat correctly.
I certainly would never try to get injured, and wouldn’t recommend this path to anyone else. However, sometimes a step back can result in a leap forward.
