Injuries and Rest Days

Unfortunately, making progress can also come with it's setbacks.

After finally nailing a Spatchcock up the pole a few weeks ago I put a bit too much pressure on my hamstring and it's since been pretty angry at me. I spent the rest of that day hardly able to sit down and struggling to get out of bed, which was a pretty good indicator that I'd pushed myself too far.

So I let it rest for about a week and a half. Then just warming up at my gym, I threw it out again doing a one-handed spin into a sort of straddle, which I love to do. I couldn't even Shoulder Mount into a V that day because it was so raw and painful. Luckily, I had one of the trainers take a look at it and he was pretty confident it was nothing nasty; just the result of pushing a bit too hard and not giving it quite enough time to rest.

I don't rest very well. Especially when I've got video entry for a competition coming up in March that I desperately need to practice for. But at the end of the day, if I keep pushing it I'll only make myself worse and then I won't be able to compete at all.

Not being able to do something you love is the pits. It sucks. But not being able to do something you love for a little bit is a lot better than, say, not being able to do it for years because you pushed through an injury and broke yourself.

So my legs have been totally out of commission. So instead, I've been working on my arms and my back. I got one of the trainers at my gym to give me a bunch of exercises I could do to shake up my workout regime a bit (which mostly consisted of being bad at pull ups and hating everything and lat pull downs on arm day) and I've been happy seeing some progress in those while my legs recover.

It's also been pretty tough for me because I'm usually pretty bendy, when it comes to my good front split at least. For a while there, I could barely touch my toes when my legs were straight because my hamstring didn't want me flexing at all. It would be so easy to get totally discouraged there and not do anything at all and I'm so glad I didn't.

I guess the moral here is resting, no matter how much you don't want to do it, is so important. Resting when you have an injury, even if it's not a very severe one, is even more important, and when you're all fixed up you can go at it twice as hard and nail all those things that are so important to you. And when it comes to being strong, there's always something else to work on while your injured parts focus on healing.

So don't give up!