Powerlifting Injury Prevention: How to Reduce Injuries
The key to success in Barbell Training for strength, health, competition, or all of the above, is longevity.
The more weight you add to the bar, the more sessions you do, and the harder you push performance, the more risk you're exposed to.
It's like crossing the street: you have to do it regularly to get where you're going, but the more times you cross, the more times you're exposed to getting hit by a car.
We can't prevent injuries much like we can't prevent a drunk driver from speeding through a red light and hitting someone.
But, we CAN absolutely reduce our risk for injury under the barbell, similar to how we look both ways before we cross the street.
So what's the best way to reduce your exposure risk to injury when barbell lifting?
It comes down to optimizing your technique and program to support health and longevity in this sport.
In this article, we're going to go over powerlifting injury prevention 101 and help you learn how to optimize your unique barbell technique for fewer aches, pains, and injuries, so your barbell lifting and training goes uninterrupted.
This will help you have less fear and more motivation to stay in the game and always get stronger.
We're going to discuss key ideas that govern how you should execute your movement to reduce your risk of injury and get as strong as possible.
We'll then discuss how you can self-coach and monitor your lifts to ensure you're optimizing your technique.
Please note that barbell technique is only one factor to consider in injury risk reduction. We encourage you to explore more of our articles to improve your outcome! You can also read our free guide about healthy barbell training here.
4 Rules For barbell lifting safeTy
1) Movement Consistency:
Regardless of what movement model or barbell technique you use for each lift, every rep should look as similar to the one before as possible. We're not talking speed here. We're talking about how you get from the start of the lift to the end of the lift. There should be as little deviation as possible in how you execute the movement from rep to rep. Key things to look out for include:
Making sure your eyes are locked to one point
Starting and ending each rep in the same, completely locked out position
Taking a big breath in before the rep, exhaling after completing the rep, and then taking a big breath in before the next one
Your bar path is straight and not curved, squiggly, or zig-zagged
2) Change In Position Under Moving Load:
Injuries happen when stabilizing joints and muscles move too much or too frequently under heavy load. Please don't misunderstand us. While a mild-to-moderate change in position under moving load can occur without subsequent injury, it's to your benefit to reduce how many reps this happens on in training.
Stabilizing joints and muscles are those that don't directly contribute to the bar moving up and down. An example of this would be your elbows moving up and down, or your wrists becoming more extended throughout a squat rep. Another example includes your back moving into a rounded position after initiating the deadlift off the floor.
3) Treat Un-racking & Re-racking With Intention:
The lift starts the moment you begin to set up. You have load on your back or in your hands, and that load is being applied to your body.
Squats & Overhead Press:
Take a big breath in and hold it before unracking the bar
Unrack the bar with a symmetrical stance
Move with intention and take as few steps as possible to your starting position
Settle into position before starting the lift and settle your lockout before racking the lift
Walk all the way into the rack looking forward and without fishing for the hooks with the bar
Bench Press:
Take a big breath in and hold it before unracking the bar
Move with intention and stay as tight as possible
Settle into position and reset your shoulders before starting the lift and settle your lockout before racking the lift
Re-rack with locked elbows
Make sure you're in the rack before letting go
Deadlift:
Settle the bar over the middle of your foot
Grip the bar tight
Separate each part of the set-up into distinct steps rather than rushing to lift the bar off the ground
Pull all the slack out of your back, arms and the bar before initiating the lift
4) Warm-up Mindfully:
Lifters often look at warms-ups as easy weight and therefore don't give them the attention they need and deserve. Here's the thing: weight is weight added to the system. It's more than your body exists with and has the potential to cause a problem even though it's light. Warm-up sets and loads serve to:
Prepare you for your working sets and
Allow you to practice your technique.
There is more chance for something to go wrong during the warm-up if you're haphazardly moving through them. If you aren't practicing intentionally as you warm-up, there's more potential for you to be unprepared for working sets, and injury potentially could ensue.
3 Ways To Critique Lifts To Reduce Injury Risk:
Whether you're brand new to barbell lifting or have been at this for some time, the only way for you to know if you're lifting well enough to reduce your injury risk is if you:
1) Have A Model off of which you are basing your movement.
Even if your model is not the same as our model, having one to base movement off of will help you with Safe Barbell Lifting Rule # 1.
This will help you have something to judge your own movement against. If you haven't started lifting yet or are unsure of what movement model to follow, check out our videos of the Squat, Bench Press, Deadlift, and Overhead Press.
2) Practice With Light Weight, so you learn and refine your movement pattern before the load gets heavy.
This can be done by starting your strength program with lightweight and progressing slowly from there over time. But also don't neglect the fact that your warm-up sets are also lightweight technique practice, as we mentioned in Safe Barbell Lifting Rule # 4.
3) Watch Videos of Yourself lifting while you're in your training session.
This will help you notice movement errors consistent with Safe Barbell Lifting Rules # 1-3 and be able to correct them on subsequent sets.
As previously mentioned, the ideas discussed in this article are only a small piece of the Longevity Game when it comes to injury risk reduction in barbell training.
Powerlifting injury prevention & Injury risk reduction is a delicate balance between barbell technique and program adaptation to you as an individual today and each training day forward.
We want you to get started today on using video to self-analyze your movement and reduce your injury risk exposure. That's why we created a guide to capturing the most useful video discreetly and on a budget. Get The Barbell Athlete’s Guide to Filming Lifts here, so every video is helpful on your journey to optimal strength and health.
Want a form check? Join the PRS Secret Society of Barbell Mastery on Facebook, where PRS Clinical Coaches provide detailed video analysis and critique every Wednesday and Friday to help enhance your performance and increase longevity in this long game we call strength!
If you're interested in learning how to optimize barbell technique, maximize strength and muscular development, and reduce injury risk (and peeing) for you, your clients or patients, then join the waitlist to get insider information on all the PRS online courses when they're ready for enrollment!