An ounce of prevention?

[Latin_Nuyorker]

I believe we as BB/Fitness people have "the more is better syndrome". We tend to believe if a little is good then a lot more is better. What most fail to realize is what relationship weights are w.r.t the overall grand design of building muscle. Let me say this, as far as I can deduce weights are only used to stimulate muscle growth. So it only takes a certain amount of weight lifting to do the stimulation. Here is an illustrative example of this. As far as tanning. You stay in the sun just long enough for your skin to produce the right amount of melanin to get the tan you like.....What happens when you stay longer, well you get sunburned. Knowing how much weight/types on exercise "you" need to produce the correct muscle stimulation is all that is necessary to produce muscle growth. So why do we do anything more, well it stems on the mindset that if a little is good more is better & that is how we end up with all the unwarranted injuries we get. Of course recovery, rest and all the other things that are essential is important but injuries gotten from overtraining is dirrectly due to doing what is not necessary

 

[overwatch]

Lifting heavy has never appealed to me. I've always been and enormous freak beast and always strong so haven't fealt like I had anything to prove even to myself. This isn't to say that heavy lifting isn't admirable. I'm sure I'm not as strong as even and average power lifter, but my motivation is seen in the mirror and DC's pants.

 

[IronInsanity]

Reminds me of an interview with Frank Zane I read a while back...

Was that early heavy lifting important for giving you a foundation on which you later built your physique?
Well, it gave me mass, but I’ll tell you one thing if I had to do it all over again, I don’t think I would have done it. It just gets you injured. You’re just focusing on the weight and often ignoring the subtle signs your body is giving you and once you’ve hurt yourself, that’s it. It never really goes away. Now I’m paying the price for all of that heavy lifting.

The old injuries are catching up to you?
Absolutely. I think as you get older, it’s inevitable that you feel the effects of the injuries you incurred years earlier. I mean, joints can only take so much. I think shoulders are very susceptible to wearing out all that upper-body work, especially if you’re training upper body heavy, training upper body two days in a row. My shoulders have been traumatized and now I have to back off shoulder work. I did so much shoulder work and they got so developed that now almost anything I do goes to my shoulders. So I’m fortunate in that I don’t have to train shoulders.
But I can’t they hurt. So, even if I just do chest and back, that’s a lot of shoulder work. Even training arms is a lot of shoulder work.

So, knowing what you know now, if you had the chance to go back to, say, ’68, ’70, would you do things differently?
In those days, I did what was necessary for me to win. This included training with heavy weights: a precursor for injury. So if I could do it over again I’d train with lighter weights, higher reps, no sets below 10 reps, with negatives slower than positives, and avoid injury. If I had done that, my physique wouldn’t have been quite as bulky, but with more definition and with less pain.

 

[sassy69]

My own experience, as I have 30 yr history of lifting and have peaked (not by goal but just by always pushing towards up / more) and now needing to come back down the other side due to wear & tear - I think the biggest thing I wish I would've had was better training in good form for the functionally correct lifts - squat / push / pull - when I started. Back in the early 80s there was NO ONE in the weight room at the Y - I don't think anyone had been in that room for 10 yrs based on the dust accumulation, and women were only doing "Jane Fonda" back then - certainly not training women in lifting. In fact all the way thru the early 90s I'd been "invited" to the "women's section" of the gym. So just basically no resources for the correct training. I think this would've spared me a lot of the lower back / hip tie-in issues that I've got now.

To the point of tendonitis - I had my first run-in w/ elbow tendonitis around 1992. I know how I got it - I was stuck at 20 lb on cable DB extensions and started jerking the cable to get past that to 30 lb. This was followed by my first trip to a physical therapist. I think this is also the first tendonitis most lifters encounter. Its hard to take a controlled approach to your lifting when you're just trying to master particular lifts. I think we all are attracted to particular lifts and these are the ones that we got the most satisfaction from, enjoy the challenge the most, and probably get too obsessed with. At a higher level, I think people also forget just how prone your elbows & wrist are to injury from repetitive motion and overtraining. The next in line for injury is the rotator cuff.

I think looking back I would've loved to have gotten that basic training in squat / push / pull form, and secondly, the concept of cyclic training w/ deload phases. Before I ever started competing, I just went to the gym because it was a necessary part of my day - just to have that couple hours outlet of physical activity and to get the daily challenge of improving a lift or whatever. Honestly nothing made me happier than back day & leg day. This probably would've been a great time to learn about periodicity and CNS burnout, but in the big picture I only had relative goals from week to week - not larger target goals that would allow planning for cyclic load / deload phases. As I got into competition, there was either balls to the wall prep w/ the lifting schedule changing from building to conditioning, and then either going straight into another prep or going into a nebulous off-season. The first 8 years after I started competing I had enough upheavals in my personal/professional life that I couldn't really schedule a true off-season w/ goals. These upheavals involved a lot of job change & relocation - so just even locating a new gym was part of the challenge.

In the big picture - when I compare friends my age who are not gym rats, they seem to have similar wear & tear issues - in terms of a bum shoulder, knees, etc. So it makes me wonder just how much is specifically due to training and not just to age-related wear & tear and the point where your body isn't able to recover as well as it used to. I've had to tone down or change how I measure "progress" in the gym and the things I draw satisfaction from. I've found I MUST spend time warming up, but also taking days OFF from the gym tend to hurt more than not takign days off. The regular activity and movement is becoming the critical piece. For my competition goals there is no point to lifting heavy any more, in fact it might actually hurt me within the judging criteria for the category I want to compete in. I have no idea where I'm going to take all of this in the future, but the one thing that has changed is that instead of being in perpetual pursuit of more / better, I am satisfied that I've already reached those goals and I'm kinda over it. Its just not as interesting, but without that to drive me, I'm still a little squishy as to what it is that makes me want to go to the gym. At the moment, I'm finding very simply an hour to "plug into my heavy metal" is sufficient motivation. Nothing makes you want to move more than some AC/DC blasting out of the speakers!

As I think of the other people I know in the gym who complain of injuries - most are at that turning point in age / recovery - around 45. Many are former football / other sports athletes who have some sort of old injury. And a few of them are in their 30s but for some reason, just friggen falling apart. I was telling one of my friends about how my mom had just gotten her hip replaced - he commented that he was thinking about doing that -- I'm like .. ummm my mom is 71 yrs old... he's 35. Yikes. I dunno what's up w/ that - but I think a lot of those situations go back to not being ego-driven in the gym.