When you get an injury do you stop weight training until it heals or work around it?

[Wendal]

I have tendonitis in both my right elbow and right knee. Have for years. Tried PT but nothing's helped so far. When you feel pain do you simply work around the injuries and avoid doing movements that hurt while continuing weight training or is it best to stop weight training all together until you're injuries are healed?

[dazlittle]

I think it depends on the severity of the injury, I've been fortunate that any aches and pains I've had over the years were all very minor (wrists, elbows, shoulders etc..). I've always determined what I was doing that caused or aggravated the pain, and then eliminated it from my routine for a while.

I must stress that I do a lot of recovery work, most nights I'm on the floor in my living room working on mobility, so I've managed to stay healthy enough.

[sy2502]

I have tendonitis in both my right elbow and right knee. Have for years. Tried PT but nothing's helped so far. When you feel pain do you simply work around the injuries and avoid doing movements that hurt while continuing weight training or is it best to stop weight training all together until you're injuries are healed?

As others said, depends on the injury. If I know it will hurt whether I exercise or not, I'll exercise anyway. Sometimes I may adjust the weights accordingly. That seems to work more than not exercising at all, for me.

[brit-iron]

I had tendonitis in both arms for a while years back. I still worked out but couldn't do ANY pull-ups for 6 months. Pull-ups, chin ups aggravated it the most. And bar curls.
Trouble was my work also aggravated it, that was harder to avoid. I now only do neutral grip pull ups.

[xTeTe]

I'm finally getting over tendonitis in my left elbow after like five months. It only really hurt when I lifted. So, I spent more time stretching my forearm before and after and started using one of those strap things around the top of my forearm. It still took a while to subside, but I just kept pushing through and it worked out okay.

My lower back flares up from time to time. I might forgo squatting for a couple weeks as a result, but I still try to make up for it with other lower body lifts in the meantime.

[MrCarrot]

I work around injuries. If I took time off I'd never go back. When I injured my knee I took over a month off from doing legs and it was no different. Sometimes I think continuing is better than doing nothing, but you have to be careful not to aggravate it further.

I also find proactive stretching and such like helps. The problem I have is I'm not proactive and I only tend to start doing such things when the issue flares up again.

[A-man]

I try to work around it as best as I can. I can’t just stop working out.

As an example, I once had knee and elbow issues at the same time. So I did a lot of abs, calves, and forearms.

[Mark1T]

Not doctor recommended, but I have always worked around injuries. Tore my rotator cuff and almost had surgery. Instead I went to the gym and trained. Hurt for 1 year.

I have had my share of nags and muscle pulls, but I never took off. It just wasn't an excuse.

[steve447]

**** no u dont stop I herniated a disc and the next week I was back in the gym deadlifting it's called not being a pussy

[adamgentile]

I always workout with injuries and do work around them. For tendonitis, paying more attention to what your wrists are doing cured my tendonitis.

[blue9steel]

I stop working the injured part, but keeping working the other stuff. No reason to stop working legs if you hurt your shoulder. You need to make sure the injury is getting sufficient rest and nutrition. As things progress you can move on to mobility and rehab work and then eventually back to slowly increasing use but don't be stupid and rush the process. For me, I've often found that if I got injured it was often something wrong with my program or form, fixing that can make a huge difference.

[induced_drag]

I recently suffered a spinal fracture and 3 disk injuries. Missed 1 day in the gym. Discussed with my orthopedic. Under his direction (as long as what I was doing was not causing pain) I was good to go.

I could count many overuse injuries. I always let pain be my guide. I always work around stuff or I would not be able to train at all.

I never workout through actual pain. Have to learn what is 'real' pain and what is discomfort from working.

[ElrondHubbard]

I had tendonitis in both arms for a while years back. I still worked out but couldn't do ANY pull-ups for 6 months. Pull-ups, chin ups aggravated it the most. And bar curls.
Trouble was my work also aggravated it, that was harder to avoid. I now only do neutral grip pull ups.

When I had elbow tendonitis a while back I found two things that helped:

1. Shifting to neutral grip pullups
2. Changing the bar grip on my squat.

I hadn't realized how much spacing width and hand position on the squat could affect my elbows. I widened my grip just a touch, and re-angled my wrist so that my three middle fingers gripped over the bar while my pinkie passed underneath the bar. That made a big difference in the amount of elbow strain.

Fortunately I haven't had any other real problems, and I can now do conventional grips on the pullups and chinups and squat again without pain.

[Eternalstuden79]

I have found as I have gotten older I have become more fragile. If I stopped training every time I broke I would be the size of a small weed.

Tendon issues are a pain, quite literally! But you can normally find a way to train the muscle without stressing the tendon. Having said that the cure for tendonoses (long term tendonitis), is optimal loading on the tendon, finding that optimum loading is the difficult bit to find.

( I had my shoulder operated on last year, I am awaiting for a op on my wrist, and I had nerve damage on my left leg (lumbosecral plexopathy) the year before the shoulder)

[Firminator4]

Seems like I am constantly training around something. Currently have a bad shoulder injured doing lateral raises in early May. I use KT tape frequently and that seems to help. If I stopped training when I had some pain, this journey would have ended years ago. I find that I have things that hurt even if I don't train so I might as well continue to do what I love and deal with the discomfort. YMMV

Firm

[Luclin999]

I have found that generally so long as the workout isn't directly making the injury worse, that it is better to keep going in the gym and to work around the problem when possible.

One thing I have noticed is that I tend to heal faster when I continue lifting than if I stop working out altogether. Probably due to the fact that your body tends to produce more HGH naturally after having been stressed from resistance training and the additional growth hormones flowing through your system will help to repair even the injured areas that you may have not worked as hard during the session.

Five years ago I was in a car accident that resulted in an injury with two bulging discs pressing into the nerve channels at C6 & C7 on the right side of my neck.

This caused severe pain, muscle spasms, numbness and even partial paralysis through my neck, shoulder, right tricep, right hand and right lat.

Because of this, I ended up not lifting for nearly a year while the doctors tried everything this side of surgery (steroids, pain killers, anti-inflammatory meds, physical therapy, spinal injections, Etc.) to treat the problem and frankly none of what they did managed to reduce the pain or restore more than 30-40% of the overall function. Ultimately, they started in with the "The only option left is spinal surgery to cut out the discs and fuse your neck" speeches which wasn't what I wanted to hear.

What did finally work? Going back to lifting.....heavy (with my legs).

One day I said the Hell with it all and just started working my legs (which weren't effected by the disc/nerve issues), going back to 3-4 days a week of just leg work. And (surprise!) after a week or two, my neck started to feel better. Almost certainly from the influx of natural HGH that my body started producing in response to the stress being put upon my legs.

It took six months overall but basically "gym therapy" managed to fix what the doctor's couldn't and I now have almost 100% of the strength and function of the effected muscles again.

[BiblicalSoldier]

For me, I try to train around the injury after I determine the extent of the injury. If I feel I need to doctor to look at it, then I get the doctor's opinion first. For example, I had a bad issue where I had to visit the chiropractor for 8 Weeks (2x per week) to get my lower back fixed. In rehab, I quite deadlifting through that time, but still did rehab lower back exercises. All depends on the extent of the injury.

[weiss1967]

When you feel pain do you simply work around the injuries and avoid doing movements that hurt while continuing weight training or is it best to stop weight training all together until you're injuries are healed?

so, consensus is to continue training. From my experience, confirmed on many occasions, I need to find the way not only to continue working out, but I need to employ the joint where the injury is. I have to find different angle where it is practically the same move but no pain. There is always a very specific tendon or muscle string that is injured, so I have to isolate it from direct work. A buddy of mine who used to be a team doctor, he says there is a science behind continuing working out. Muscles are healed by building a scar tissue. And this scar tissue can grow being either functional (contributing to contraction) or completely dysfunctional, and that depends on weather that muscle was subjected to light loads while healing. Tendonitis is very similar to muscle injury in that regard. It would progress or at least stop healing when I slack. Counter-intuitive, but true. The only way I found to completely get rid of nagging tendonitis was going high reps. I am injury-free since 2012, my longest stretch so far.