By Jamie and Shawna Lewellen
Daily Iowegian
CENTERVILLE —
Iron Dreams Q & A will be published each week in the Daily Iowegian. To submit a question or topic to Jamie and Shawna, send your e-mails to: askJamieandShawna@hot mail.com.
Question: If I have an injury, do I stop exercising or do I keep working out? I want to keep training, but what is the answer?
Answer: Thanks for the question! I chose to discuss this topic this week because I am the perfect example of the right way to deal with this and the wrong way.
I’ll tell on myself to hopefully clear up the best way of doing this. First of all, I did not do the best way!
The goal of an exercise and nutrition system is to improve yourself physically and mentally, inside and outside. After you have a goal, then you must find the smartest way to achieve that goal. Progress must be made daily on a “small steps repeated” basis.
With that in mind, my goal is to get stronger, bigger and leaner with every workout. The problem is that six months ago, I hurt my shoulder and elbow doing my 25th repetition on my set of pull ups. If I can do 24 reps on pull ups, you would think that the 25th rep wouldn’t hurt me, but that’s how it goes. Injuries happen even on a high rep set, not just heavy low rep power sets.
It’s a blessing that I understand the human body and how it works so I can design workout and nutrition programs for myself and everyone at Iron Dreams. The curse is that when a small injury comes up, I can still train with 100 percent focus and intensity by picking up an exercise that shifts the focus off of the injury but still hits the muscle group that is injured. By changing the angle in which you perform, an exercise can still let you train the injured area without even feeling the actual injury. Therefore letting the injury heal without stopping your training routine.
I still trained on my normal routine, but just picked up different exercises that didn’t affect my elbow. I made progress on a daily basis just like normal so I didn’t think much about my injury.
Six months went by with my elbow gradually getting worse to the point where I couldn’t grip without a numb tingling feeling running through my arm.
I finally went and got X-rays on my injury. My elbow that was hurting and causing numbness turned out to be a dislocated shoulder. My shoulder never hurt the entire six months so I had no idea it was dislocated, it was my elbow that was bothering me.
As I said earlier, I trained around my injury and still made progress every session. That was the exact thing to do: keep training around the injury.
The wrong thing was not checking out the injury six months earlier. Although I still made progress daily, I cannot get my shoulder popped back into place because it’s been out so long that the muscles have actually strengthened themselves around the joint but while the joint was in the wrong position. Five chiropractic sessions later, the shoulder joint finally was forced back into proper alignment.
My point: Keep training around injuries but always check the injuries out first, not six months later!
Remember, the basics work for everybody all the time. Send questions to Iron Dreams 2 Fitness, 1118 S. 17th St., Centerville, Iowa 52544 or e-mail askjamieandshawna@hot mail.com
