Powerlifting Injury Myth: you can’t train when you’re in pain!
You’re training hard, chasing PRs, and working your butt off to make a difference for yourself in and out of the gym. From one training day to the next, you’re getting the weight up, feeling good, and getting STRONGER. However, when things don’t go your way, you may end up in pain. Whether it’s a pain you’ve been dealing with forever or simply a new pain to add to the list, it sucks. Rest assured, it happens to the best of us. You can also read our free guide to healthy barbell training here.
Now the question is: what do you do? I’m sure you’ve been told at one point in your life to stop what you’re doing and rest. You’ve probably been told that you’ll make it worse if you continue to train. Similar to a light switch, at one point you were on and the next you’re off, laying in bed hoping the pain will go away soon. While this sounds good in theory, more often than not…
REST IS NOT THE ANSWER!
Now, this doesn’t mean to keep pushing forward as if nothing happened. We need to understand the nature of our pain experience to get us on the right path back to doing what we love. To help with that, here are three analogies you can use to help guide you when training with pain!
1. The Traffic Light Method
This method uses the commonly encountered traffic light to help us navigate pain during training. As we know, the traffic light helps us understand when we need to come to a stop, slow down, or can go forward. We can use this in training to help us understand the next steps forward and continue training! To use this, we simply just need to understand what each light means in regards to training and how it applies to our unique situation. We can do this by paying attention to pain intensity and how it travels (if it does).
Red lights are probably the easiest to wrap our heads around. If something is getting worse with the training you’re doing, STOP. You’re better off finding a load or variation that doesn’t provoke symptoms. Two examples of this could be feeling back pain that is getting worse as you increase the weight on the deadlift, or ankle pain that gets worse when you’re doing the standing overhead press. These are situations where there are factors we can modify - adjust the weight on the bar, sitting down to press, etc. - to continue to train despite running into the red light.
Yellow lights are a bit more complicated. This is the case because you may experience pain here, but it’s within a tolerable range that we can continue with. For example, we can set a number for a pain scale that we don’t want to pass. This scale varies from person to person, but for this example let’s use 4 out of 10. If we’re squatting and we are experiencing some knee pain, the first thing we can ask ourselves is “Can I tolerate this? Where is this on my pain scale?” If we determine the pain is around a 3 out of 10, and it does not get worse with exercise, we can continue while monitoring closely. Asking these questions allows us to see if we can continue to train with pain that is tolerable and does not interfere with the quality of our movement (i.e. the pain doesn’t make you close your eyes when you squat). Exposing ourselves to training within yellow lights can be reassuring, especially if it gets you back to doing what you love.
You can probably guess what green lights are, but for the sake of completeness, let’s talk about them.
Green lights mean we can continue without worry. Essentially, we have found a load or movement that doesn’t really provoke our pain at all, and we can train as normal. For example, if we sprained our ankle and can’t put weight on it, standing overhead press may be a bit challenging early on; however, we can simply sit on a bench and perform seated overhead press as an alternative. We’ve found our green light! As things calm down, we can start to get some load on the ankle and progress to the standing overhead press. The most important thing with green lights is that we’ve found our entry point to stay active and avoid resting completely!
It is important with this method to be honest. Don’t start speeding up at a yellow light to try and beat the red, you might end up with a ticket on your end (or in this case, experiencing more pain than you’d like to). It is also important to note that movements in the traffic light system can move from one light to the other, since life happens, for better or for worse.
2. The Pain Dial
The pain dial is a deceivingly simple, yet very effective way to view pain as it relates to physical activity. All we use in this method is an imaginary dial that ranges from 1-10, with 1 being the absolute least we can do vs. 10 being the ideal movement/load we want to return to. It’s similar to the pain scale that we are all familiar with whenever we are told to “rate” our pain. This method is useful because it avoids the light switch mentality that can lead to us resting unnecessarily.
For example, let’s say we feel intolerable back pain that causes us to drop the weight with the deadlift. What do we do? Well, let’s look at our dial. In this scenario, a rating of 10 is performing the deadlift at the prescribed load. Since we can’t tolerate that in this example, let’s turn the dial down a bit. This is unique from person to person, but some adjustments can include lowering the weight, changing our grip, changing our stance, or even shortening the range of motion. The beauty of this is that we have so many options that are unique to us. Some changes are more drastic than others, and the lower the number on the dial, the more drastic the change we need to make. It does require some thinking beforehand, but this is a great way to take matters into your own hands with training, especially with issues that continue to occur.
3. The PRS Algorithm
This one is my personal favorite because it lays out everything for you! From warm-up to working set, the algorithm walks with you step by step to make a training decision. The idea of the algorithm is centered around the idea that there are ways we can train around our pain. Whether it’s training the movement we intended to or simply training an uninvolved body part, we can use the algorithm to help us decide what is the best course of action. Here is the algorithm below:
As you can see above, it starts even before the workout starts. Are your baseline symptoms greater than a 6 out of 10? If not, proceed to the next step in the algorithm. If they are, it’s best to train another area of the body for now until things calm down. Then it moves into dynamic warm-ups, intended lifts, and load increases, each step offering advice on what to do next.
This is a simple yet effective way to manage pain in the gym and keep you training!
Regardless of what method you use, the important message to understand is that there is always an entry point that we can start from. It may take some work to find it, but it’s worth it if it keeps you doing what you love. Keep in mind, while this does help you train with pain, we need to understand why the pain is there. Is it a programming issue? What about technique? Or maybe, is it a combination of the two plus stresses from the different realms of life? It varies from person to person, but regardless, now you have a way to train with pain while we figure it out.
If you are experiencing serious, overwhelming pain that disrupts your life, and/or the pain is getting worse: seek help from a clinical professional who will guide you through the process and keep you doing what you love!
Dealing with chronic or acute injuries interrupting your training? Book a free call with a PRS Clinical Coach today to get some answers!
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