A Brush With Injury

So I trained something a bit too hard

Mark Brown

May 3, 2023

I have recently been forced to deal with a legitimate injury that will require recovery efforts that I haven’t had to deal with in awhile. I have learned some pretty important lessons from it during that time. The primary cause of it seems to be overtraining my hips. There was no moment of shooting pain until 3 mornings after the final weight had been lifted. I know that recovery is a bit of a blind spot for me because of my mentality so the last few weeks have forced me to work through days differently.

Monday April 17 I woke up for work with a slightly sore back. It’s not first time I’ve felt that, nor will it be the last going forward. I went to work and the feeling never really improved, but I thought nothing of it. Soreness is part of the game, after all. Tuesday morning was the day that I woke up feeling something I had never physically felt before. It was a sharp, constant pain with an epicenter in my upper left glute. I gutted through work on Tuesday. Had to sit down a lot of times, take everything extremely slowly and couldn’t really pick anything up from the ground. I was getting more useless by the second so I got to my 8 hours and had to walk out the door before everything was finished. Anyone that knows me knows how much I hated doing that. Tuesday was the most awful day that I have had to endure while at Casey’s physically. There was no chance in hell I was coming to work on Wednesday. Then Thursday. Friday I got into my car, started it to try to drive to work but decided within about 10 seconds that it wasn’t happening either. What happened between Tuesday and Friday is fodder for at least 1 “Lessons from getting injured…” blog post.

The week prior I was on vacation. I lifted both very heavy and very differently comparative to what I normally do. I was aiming to use my week of vacation as one where I could experiment with splitting my lifting sessions up through out the day. Main lifts during the day in the garage and finish up with supplemental and accessory lifts in the gym, where all the machines are. My initial intention was to give a 4-5 hour split between the sessions but I didn’t follow through with it. I ended up finishing my work in the garage then driving to the gym to complete the rest of it. I didn’t think anything of it. I still don’t know if that that any impact on what happened afterward. Maybe it was the final crack in the dam. Maybe not. I did squat and deadlift higher numbers than I have in quite a bit while also working in the 95-100% range for a large chunk of the session. On Tuesday, I did 4 sets of 3 above 400 doing doing box squats: 405, 415, 425 and 435.That totaled 19,260 pounds of workload on just squats. I did block pulls off of a 3 inch mats on Saturday. Two sets of a 3 at 405 and 415 set the stage for me to pull 425 for the first time off of mats. There was only real hard struggle on the 3rd reps done at 415 pounds and the very last rep at 425 pounds. I only did pressing on Wednesday so the 3 days lifted while on vacation was less than my normal number of days lifted in a week but I packed every one of those sessions with enough for the entire week.

I’ve felt back pain and soreness before, mostly in the aftermath of deadlifts, but never quite like this. The pain itself was the thing that was so radically different. I can mentally deal with soreness and stiffness, but sheer amount of sharp, deep pain was overwhelming. I couldn’t bend over at all. That made all of the things I do easily almost impossible. Merely putting on pants and socks from Wednesday to Friday was a major victory. I put the former on a couple of times and the latter on once. That was when I tried to get myself to work on Friday. It was so, so hard to get myself into position to lean forward to be able to use even a small amount of leverage to get socks and shoes on. Driving got progressively worse through the 3 days. My hip was in progressively more pain when I drove anywhere. Fifteen to twenty minute drives were agony and felt like they took forever. By Friday 5 minute drives reached the same level of discomfort. It was both very eye opening just how much misery I was in by my left leg being forced into a position that I couldn’t avoid. The drive to Fareway on Friday to get pain medication was one I dreaded. I knew it needed to be done but I did delay it because of the pain.

The biggest effect of the pain was something that I’ve known about for years but never really felt in the worst possible way until now. I’ve laid in bed many times for hours on end because I just couldn’t calm myself down mentally. Everyone’s done it. I’ve also known for years that overwhelming physical pain can cause the same effect. I have now experienced that. It is every bit as bad as it as I thought it was. I tried numerous times in those 3 days to force myself to sleep but I couldn’t lay down in any position without making my hip fire even more than they already were. I was stuck in one position for 3 days. That was sitting on my recliner slightly leaned back so I didn’t make physical contact with the point on my body that was most sensitive. My left foot was up on an ottoman placed in front of the recliner most of the time. That gave enough space for me to ice my back. I did fall asleep a few times but never more than 45 minutes. Of all the things I have experienced in my life physically, not being able to fall asleep while being dead tired for about 90 hours is easily one of the worst of the bunch. Thursday into Friday was the worst day 30 or so hours I have had in long, long time. The only thing I was really capable of doing was ice my back or heat my back and watch television. That led me to watch a lot of 90s movies I have already seen a lot. GoldenEye, Deep Blue Sea, Braveheart all got watched on that day. What can I say? I grew up in the 90s.

Thursday I met with a chiropractor to help determine what the issue was and a path forward. It was my first time seeing one. I’ve seen videos on Youtube but didn’t know exactly what to expect. It was a major learning experience. He actually confirmed some things I had been physically feeling for years. It made me wonder why I hadn’t done this before. On the initial assessment, he told me that my left leg was 1 inch shorter than my right. My left hip was 1 inch higher than my right hip. I have always noticed the musculature on my left hip was physically in a different spot than my right when I looked in the mirror but never imagined it was because my hip was out of place. He made some adjustments to start getting my hip back in proper alignment. The most important thing was that he was able to determine that I hadn’t slipped a disc in my back because of where I wasn’t feeling pain when I moved my leg. My IT Band being strained was likely the cause of my pain. That’s what was causing the nerves in the area to over fire and prevent me from being able to sleep. I left in a little less pain but there was still a lot of work left to do. He told me to keep icing the area and I made another appointment for the following Tuesday to check back up on it. The check up went well. He told my hip still wasn’t exactly in the right spot but it’s better.

On a scale of 0 to 10, I was a full scale 0 for these 3 days. I was borderline useless to everyone including myself. I determined that my recovery plan from this IT Band strain had to have 3 different phases to it. Seeking professional help in a professional setting was the first phase. That part was initially done at the chiropractors office. He got the ball rolling. If I need to see a doctor about in the future, that will be part of it. The second is at-home recovery care. That has involved icing my back with ice packs and alternating that with heating pads. The third level was pain mitigation. I don’t typically have pain medication in the house because I very rarely need it. I knew it would be necessary for me to have any hope of getting any rest whatsoever. I grabbed some with a sleeping aid in it for when I was at home and some acetaminophen for when I was at work. This last part was the most crucial in the moment because I was able to stop feeling all of the signals my hip was sending my brain. Friday night I slept for 10 hours. It’s been years since I’ve slept that long. By Monday, I felt pretty decent. I rated myself a solid 6.5 out of 10 when people asked at work the following week. I was capable of bending over and moving as well as I needed to. I’m currently on vacation for a few weeks so I have more opportunities to relax a bit more throughout the day. I’ve always believed that making the body stronger so it can take the strain of everyday life is the best way to manage everything. Being forced to have pain medication with me just in case I needed it hasn’t changed that one bit. It’s also affirmed my belief that pain medication is a PED. I went from “not being able to put socks on” to feeling “not injured” because of them. If that’s not a PED, I don’t know what is.

I have replayed in my head multiple times over the last few weeks what all led up to my IT Band finally telling me to stop. I know there were times when I was doing barbell hip thrusts that my left glute would tense up while I was doing reps. With the weight, sets and reps that was on the bar, 315 pounds for 4 sets of 12, I thought of it as normal strain on the abductor muscle. I never felt the same level of strain when using the abductor machine but I also knew doing 2 to 3 sets of 50 reps at 295 pounds was inducing quite a bit of it. The abductor machine has gotten maligned as a “girls machine” but it does serious work. Yes, I am putting serious work into building a better ass. The focus I have put on developing strength in my hip likely put the smaller muscles and various other tissues at risk for overtraining at the weights I was working with. It’s not the first time I’ve heard about smaller muscle groups being more vulnerable to overtraining. I don’t train forearms that hard for that reason. I don’t normally get concerned when I do lifts successfully in the 12 rep range because I know that I am capable of doing them without a lot of short term risk. This has opened my eyes to the possible long term effects from lifts I do in that range. That includes lifts I have recently added to the program like dumbbell pullovers.

Overall, I’m in a decent place physically and mentally. I’m capable of getting through days without pain medication now. I haven’t quite figured out how I am will be dealing with the next few weeks of training yet. Bench pressing seems fine enough to do, as does tricep and seated bicep work. I have learned that keeping pain medication around the house is a good thing. I’m pretty bad at keeping medication in the house because I don’t typically need it. Not living with someone causes me to tend to keep only things around that I need in the moment. I am very anxious to get back to squatting and pulling. Just going to take some time.