How People Get Injured (From Exercise).

Ask someone about “exercise-related injuries” and what you’ll get most often is a hazy description of some traumatic event:

“I fell in a hole jogging and tore my Achilles.”

“I blew out my knee and ankle going for the rebound.”

“Pulled a groin muscle playing jai-alai last week.”

Accidents do happen, and some sport activities are certainly higher risk than others (**cough cough jiujitsu cough).  But what most commonly happens is not nearly as spectacular.

Most commonly, the injury sequence is as follows:  You grab a pair of dumbbells, sit on the bench, and focus.  You get yourself into position, start to slowly and purposefully curl the dumbbells up, and *ping* – you’ve just torn your biceps tendon.

Or, how about this: You perform a workout.  All goes well.  Then, the next morning, you find it impossible to get out of bed because your back has become an unresponsive morass of pain.

Not nearly as sexy as, say, getting your MCL torn by a Thai kick.  What happened?

I read a great post from Seth which I will now quote completely out of context:

“You can stretch a rubber band for a long time. But then it breaks.”

Translation: It wasn’t any one thing you did that caused the injury.  Rather, trauma accumulated over time until finally whatever it is you broke, broke.

Many people who sustain a back injury (i.e., herniated disk) do so not because they attempted to pick up a grand piano, but because of something far more mundane (e.g., they bent over to pick up a pencil, sneezed, etc.).  How could the “straw that broke the camel’s back” be so insignificant?

Answer: Over the course of your lifetime, you damage the structures that hold your body together (bone, muscle, soft tissue, etc.).  Like the microscopic fissures that accumulate and eventually overwhelm large structures like bridges, the microtrauma you sustain in your limbs and joints build up, until even a small insult (one that a healthy joint or tissue could easily have resisted) is too much for the damaged soft tissue to bear, and *pop*.

An all-too common example: You’re a runner; you have been all your life. You’re entering your fifth decade of life, and things aren’t holding together so well anymore – you tire more easily, recover more slowly, things hurt. So you decide to take up weight training at your local Y, since you know all the great things strength training can do for you. You set up a leg press machine with a conservative weight and carefully load yourself in. Things go smoothly until the 6th rep, when you get a weird twinge in your back. The next morning, the pain is so severe that you consider yourself lucky that it only took you 43 minutes to get out of bed.

You could say the strength training exercise hurt you. But what’s more likely is that the accumulated trauma of thousands and thousands of pounds of force over the course of years weakened your support structure (bones, muscles, connective tissue) and you would have been just as likely to injure your back picking up a full basket of apples while apple picking with your 9 year-old nephew.

Not to say that you can’t hurt yourself by dropping a dumbbell on your foot, or getting roundhouse kicked in the face.  But most of the major, lifestyle-changing “injuries” that cause people to forego exercise (herniated disc, arthritis, etc.) are degenerative conditions, which begs a question – why exercise in a manner that hastens that degeneration?