Injuries that could have been prevented

Hey everyone!

Gymnastic Bodies is getting a lot of attention right now and the forum is growing daily.

I wanted to start a thread (or a record if you will), to share stories of injuries that people have

received  from skipping progressions, or attempting to train Gymnastic Strength Training™ (GST) without

proper guidance or believing they are strong enough to do so.

It's very common to see people come to the forums asking for advice complaining of elbow/bicep/shoulder/chest - you name it pain from training. When asked what they are doing, almost always they are training elements beyond their current capacity (either due to lack of mobility or joint preparation).

Also I am seeing people ask for advice on training specific elements, and when they are told to take a step back, they ignore the advice because 'they know their own body'.

This is serious stuff. I dont want  to dissuade people from GST, but to educate before a torn bicep has to. 

So please, I invite you to tell your story.  What was your injury? (Did you need surgery?)  What were you training? What did you do to progress? (Fix muscle imbalance, go back to easier progressions etc).

Hopefully enough stories can prevent devastating injuries that otherwise could have been avoided by smart training.

I will start with a classic.

A little more than a year ago I was training the backlever progressions according to BtGB and an advanced tuck pretty quickly. I was not aware of any prerequisities to it (I heard of a "german hang" but not never considered it since I could perform BL easily).

Every time I went up in the BL I felt a hard stretch in my chest, shoulders and elbows, not uncomforable, but still harder than any other exercises. I never remotely considered flexibility a problem for my strength training, I just felt the pump and used linear progressions without giving it a thought. Also I did not care too much about perfect form, maybe because I did not know of it anyway.

So, one fine day I felt a small sprain in my right biceps, never really gave it a thought, just trained through it. It was a little uncomfortable at first, but it passed as a little tightness. Eventually I stopped training BL and other skills because of a chronic shoulder impingement from volleyball.

As of lately I have recovered from my shoulder injury and almost recovered from the biceps that might have taken a sprain and just became tighter because of no stretch or circulation training.

I am glad I came to this forum and learned a lot about prerequisities, mobility, flexibility, proper form and most of all - humility. I have to admit that it was hard to swallow the red pill and start over. Glad I did.

Don't force mobility or stretching.  Just don't.

I was 19 and about 4-5 inches from the side splits.  One day I felt really flexible, and sure enough when I tried I went my lowest yet, maybe 2-3 inches away from the floor.  "Today is the day," I thought, "I'm going to nail it today."  So I pushed hard for those last few glorious inches ... and ended up pulling one of those lovely groin muscles.

Ten years later of on-again, off-again stretching and I've regained my old flexibility, 4-5 inches from the floor.  Ten years.  To be fair, I mostly stopped training during my university years, but still, years.  My progress was set back a decade.  Even now, when I stretch, I'm super careful to make sure my hardwork doesn't hit the reset button again.

If you have a mobility or flexibility deficit, as most everyone will, don't force it.  If you work it it will come.  If you push hard, it will push back hard, and that isn't much fun.

I had a bicep tendonitis about 2 years ago by training iron cross prematurely, i then stopped with all pulling movements, no handstand, no pull ups etc. Fortunately some months afterwards I had my first GB seminar in Helsinki and i planned to start gain from foundation. it took about 8 months to heal completely, after foundation no signs of residue damage.

Now the bad point. My old Coach pushed my too hard into training new vault to increase the starting value, at the moment my pushing strength in handstand wasn't proficient as now and i did thousands of low landings. At the beginning i was training 2 days a week and i was able to recover but when i moved to 3 my lack of preparation on legs strength and adductors strength come out. Due to my ACL injury i was progressing slowly over Foundations for the legs work so my legs were not prepared for this type of deceleration. I'm a good example of why kipping and accelerated movement are not good if you have low basic strength.all the deceleration during eccentric phase was involving less fibers and more connective tissue. using less words, i've reached the point where i wasn't able to walk freely and sleep freely without feeling pain, I've stopped with vault and acrobatic part, i've changed gym and coach and i've stopped with lower body stretching, i've lost my side split, my front split, my pancake, my straddle L and so on. in 8 months one adductor it's healed, now the left it's healing, but it's a long journey. bad experience and bad coach it's what I payed on my physique.

alex87 said:

I had a bicep tendonitis about 2 years ago by training iron cross prematurely, i then stopped with all pulling movements, no handstand, no pull ups etc. Fortunately some months after I had my first GB seminar in Helsinki and i planned to start gain from foundation. it took about 8 months to heal completely, after foundation no signs of residue damage.

 

Now the bad point. My old Coach pushed my too hard into training new vault to increase the starting value, at the moment my pushing strength in handstand wasn't proficient as now and i did thousands of low landings. At the beginning i was training 2 days a week and i was able to recover but when i moved to 3 my lack of preparation on legs strength and adductors strength come out. Due to my ACL injury i was progressing slowly over Foundations for the legs work so my legs were not prepared for this type of deceleration. I'm a good example of why kipping and accelerated movement are not good if you have low basic strength.all the deceleration during eccentric phase was involving less fibers and more connective tissue. using less words, i've reached the point where i wasn't able to walk freely and sleep freely without feeling pain, I've stopped with vault and acrobatic part, i've changed gym and coach and i've stopped with lower body stretching, i've lost my side split, my front split, my pancake, my straddle L and so on. in 8 months one adductor it's healed, now the left it's healing, but it's a long journey. bad experience and bad coach it's what I payed on my physique.

This is something that makes me angry. One thing is that you make mistakes yourself and gets injuries out of stupidity; another thing is when you trust someone to be smarter than you are, and then find out that your coach is the most reckless one and that it has to be you who pays the price.