My body keeps failing me....

[RePete92]

Hey everyone! I am 20, Aussie, male and was once a competitive swimmer. I got stress fractures in my back years ago from overtraining and this took me about 2 years to completely get over. So after 2 years of very little physical activity I realised I was horribly out of shape and felt weak. Being an ectomorph and not liking it I decided to get a gym membership. For the first year I kinda didn't know what I was doing, I had some **** personal trainers who taught me very little on form and never told me the key fact that I needed to do compound movements. So bad infact that on the first gym session I strained both my biceps in the very first session, as well as several other low grade strains in my first few months. Starting doing weights I discovered it was quite common to get some minor injuries like this to start with and it taught me a lot about working on form. Anyway fast forward until I'm early 19, feel like I have a deltoid strain after testing out a 'how fast can you throw' thingo at Uni. Gets misdiagnosed by a phsio who thinks it is a strain and then it reoccurs a month and a bit down the line during an arm wrestle. After being misdiagnosed as a shoulder strain again I get a new phisio and discover its shoulder bursitis (aka swimmers shoulder) , confirmed by scans. This injury never goes away, every few months as soon as I would get some decent gains it would flare up and I would have to stop doing weights for awhile. Eventually with the help of some supplements it doesn't flare up and I am about 90% sure now its almost completely gone. It took me roughly 14months to get over it.

Now fast forward to 4 months ago. I finally start a more 'body builder' like program. I do some research, as well as find a better personal trainer and start on a proper program. I go from 2-3 times a week doing a crappy gym program to 4-5 times (2 chest/arms days, 1 leg, 2 back/shoulders) a week focusing on the heavy compound movements, forget about most the isolation exercises and get my diet in better check, all whilst centering my program around focussing on good form and preventing heavy strain on my shoulders. I start to see some really good gains along the way, my core starts to feel rock solid and hence by back days start to feel great, my bench weights go up and up and I start to like the transformation going on in the mirror, I was killing it. And then after months of no soft tissue injuries, over 2 months since any noticeable shoulder pain - at a time when I could almost say I was injury free GUESS what happens? I am doing decline bench press, just light as part of a warmup. Then I put the bar down having finished, lower my head under the barbell and sit up. Just as I am sitting up I notice a horrible sharp pain below my right pec. Thinking it might just be muscle tightness (which I suffer from a fare bit from sitting around studying all day) I continue on and do some dumbbell chest presses, no pain in the pecs - good. But as I sit up I feel the horrible pain again and realize its in my obliques. I go home and ice that **** like crazy and see a phisio, turns out its a nasty high grade 1 tear, bornerline grade 2 in my oblique (most likely, hard to tell in this location). Cannot situp without using my arms and horrible painful for the first 10 days. It has now been over two weeks since the injury and I doubt I will be back in the gym at all for atleast 10 days. All my hard work getting to where I was disappearing like crazy. My quads shrinking to levels I havent seen since I started gym (had 6 weeks of no legs now for other reasons). I literally cannot do anything whilst with this injury. I go for a walk - painful, I try a biceps curl - painful, I try leg press - painful. It is horrible, if it was a shoulder or a leg strain you can work the rest of your body but this has left me to not be able to do anything - something I havent had to deal with before.

So there is pretty much my life story with weight lifting, doing newbie mistakes early on and then doing a horrible injury later not lifting weights, but by bloody sitting up awkwardly. How does one get motivated with such a record like this? I feel like my body keeps failing me to easy....It seems as soon as I take two steps forwards I then take 1.9 steps backwards and eventually feel like I have got nowhere. Has anyone else gone through similar times? Did you eventually prevail? Any advice for a person like me?

[leroylavey]

I don't understand your question. If you are asking advice about your failures then think of those failures as a success. You are obviously doing something wrong if your body is responding like that. There are many ways to look at this. You may try taking a deload week or lower the weights for a week or two. Maybe get massages or go see a chiropractor (not sure how to spell it). maybe you don't have good form. The purpose of form is to minimize injury.

Pay close attention to your body and learn to communicate with it.

[E90335i]

Here's me:
Born with my feet pointing in the wrong direction and had leg braces for 2 years and scars all over my legs for life.
2 cracked vertebrae
Both rotator cuffs torn
Almost no feeling in right forearm due to ulna nerve damage from an accident
2 ruptured quad tendon surgeries
MCL surgery
Torn quad muscle surgery
Tore pec muscle

I'm still hitting them gym hard as ever. You just have to be smart about it. Stop doing heavy compound lifts. Stop training each body part twice a week. Get your nutrition in check.
Start lifting with drop sets. I used to go too heavy and slightly tore my pec a few times. Stop using a straight bar, it's the worst thing you can do for your injured shoulders. Only used dumbbells for pressing movements.
Warmup both rotator cuffs before any chest and shoulder workout.
Drop sets should be:
First part 8-10 reps, immediately cut weight in half and do as many reps as possible, should be about 12-15 reps. 3 sets per exercise and 5 exercises per body part.
This has saved my joints and I was in the best physical looking shape of my life.
If you want the full skinny on the workout and you want motivation, join gregplitt.com. It's the best $9.95 you will ever spend.

Stop making excuses, learn from your mistakes and grow mentally and physically. You are young and have a lot of life left in you. It's your time, how do you want to spend it, aesthetic or a miserable excuse on a couch?

[golvmopp]

Stop doing heavy compound lifts.

My bullchit alarm is going berzerk.

When you encounter a hurdle, you do your absolute best to work around it, rather than giving some incompetent horsechit-advice designed to turn another human being into a carbon copy of you, regardless of their own goals and ambitions. You have a severe history of injuries, no doubt, and what you're doing obviously works for you - swell.

But to discard the staple movements of all resistance training in one breath while you in the next praise some fuking website you gotta drop dollars on to access is so fuking lol-worthy I would laugh if you didnt carry the risk of infecting OP with your poison. RePete92 has by his own admission had chitty luck with instructors - the much more intelligent and sensible approach would be to ask if his technique is poor in a manner that aggravates or even caused the injury, and if so whether the eventual new technical cues will allow him to completely work around the issue.

Instead we get some caveman bullchit like "SQUATS R BAD 4 UR BACK" which I imagine is followed up by some big dumb oaf grunting. Examples of my injuries:

- chronic AC-tear right shoulder
- agitated ulnar nerve that goes haywire on bench and SOHP
- painfully tight hipflexors
- low back pain

Do you roll over and quit, or try to work around them? All of those issues were solved by technical cues and rehabilitating efforts, rather than just going "oh welll thats a wrap" and recommending a website whose fee you'd probably be better of using to purchase ten dollars worth of bubblegum to stick up your ass in the quest of finding out whether you can blow bubbles by farting.