What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
Today we're going to talk about, and figure out whether your workouts are the source of
your pain.
You see, if you were to take an assessment right now of yourself, maybe you have – and
you likely have – two, three, maybe even four spots that hurt.
Does the inside of your elbow hurt, maybe, when you do pullups?
You're just sitting here, turning your head right or left do you get a little pain, or
a bit of soreness?
One direction versus the other?
Maybe your low back hurts when you're doing ab exercises, or your knees hurt when you
try to squat, or when you raise your arm up over your head one doesn’t go up as high,
or as smooth as the other, or it cracks and pops.
Something is probably wrong.
You have to ask yourself, "Is it your training that’s causing these discomforts and pains?"
Or if you weren't training, would the weakness that you have make things even worse?
I could tell you this: the big mistake regardless of how many things are hurting you at this
point, is that you're comparing yourself to yourself yesterday.
I'm talking about maybe even literally yesterday, when you approached the gym for your workout
today.
That's the mistake because the more you do that, the more you're setting yourself up
to incur more of these injuries.
Even if your training is really not to blame.
Meaning that your training program is good.
Now, unfortunately, as a physical therapist who treats a lot of people that come to me
following bad training regimens and programs, I can tell you that a lot of them aren't.
They're leaving them in this condition where they're feeling beat up and maybe you're feeling
that way too, because of the shitty thing that you're following.
The shitty workouts that you're following.
But if they're good, if you approach the gym with that mentality of always being the same
guy every single day, or woman every single day, you're not going to wind up getting the
most out of your body.
Sometimes you have to be able to react on the fly and say "I'm changing things up."
So I always remember this story when I was in Port St. Lucia with the Mets training at
Gold's Gym.
I went in there one day and I'm doing my regular workout, and I'm the other side of one of
those multi-stacked pieces of equipment.
There's a girl doing tricep push downs on the other side.
She's literally mid-set and she's getting more and more frustrated, and then she's like
"I can't feel it!
I can't feel it!
I can't feel it!"
She's telling her training partner.
I'm like "This is fucking crazy."
"I can't feel it!
I can't feel it!"
she starts balling.
"I can't feel it in my triceps.
I can't feel it."
I’m like "Holy shit!"
It was really like John Rambo at the end of First Blood.
If you haven't seen it you'll – or if you have, you'll know exactly what I'm talking
about.
I remember thinking "What is the big deal?
Who cares if it doesn't – if you were able to bench press 350 in the last workout, and
this time you can't; so what?!
It's a single workout."
Where injuries occur is when you try to demand from your body the same performance that you
were capable of a few days prior on a day that you may not be able to.
Maybe you're just not feeling it today.
Maybe your shoulders are a little bit stiff.
Maybe something else that you did led to that being stiff.
Maybe yard work left your shoulders being stiff, that doesn't allow you to perform the
way you did the other day when you trained your chest.
Whatever the reason is, you have to be able to react on the fly and change that, and not
be so obsessed that is going to set you back in any particular way.
Demanding something out of your body that you don’t have is going to set you back.
So here's where this all comes to a head, and the best advice I could ever give you
is what I try to bring to you every single week on this channel.
That is: learn the "Why" of what you're doing, and not just the "What".
Because the "what" alone is what gets you in trouble.
"Oh, I know what to do.
I was told what to do."
Okay.
Exercise A, B, C, D, whatever, with no care at all about the conditions that might be
present while I'm trying to do exercise A, B, C, D. if you know why you're doing exercise
A, B, C, D, and then also know why what you're doing woks when you're doing exercises A,
B, C, D; now you become empowered to actually change those when you need to, and not obsess
or feel like you're going to be taking a major step backward when you do make those changes.
So I always try here to tell you guys the "why" of what we do.
I think that's what makes our channel different from everybody else.
That is: I want to educate you as to why.
Don't just "Here's what to do."
Because "here's what to do" is not going to address everybody out there.
But knowing why is going to allow you to make the decisions yourself of when you should
be making some changes and when you should, maybe, step back.
As far as the message of this video, I'm going to tell you this: it's not an old man's message.
One for guys like me.
It's for guys that are probably even more valuable to people that are a lot younger
than me.
Because had I not followed the bad advice I got and continued trying to demand stuff
out of my body that I wasn't capable of – like hammering myself every day trying to bring
the same performance that I didn’t have, necessarily, and not in an admirable way,
I just didn't have it.
It's very normal for us not to be consistently excellent.
I hurt myself probably very badly in my teen years and in my early 20s training that way.
To the point where, now, I'm trying to be able to overcome that.
The good news is this: when you have all the tools – and I've got the tools.
One of the best things I became was a master of compensation.
I can come up with a million different ways.
It's one of my biggest strengths as a physical therapist.
A million different ways to tweak and exercise to allow me to do something.
It will allow you to actually train through moments when you have aches and pains, whatever
they may be.
Now you don’t have to abandon what's going on.
I've always said you don’t have to be abandoned training when some things hurt.
You can figure out ways to even train that single area as well.
You've just got to know how to make out a patience to do that.
So guys, I hope you've found this video helpful.
The idea is to learn the why, not just the what, and you'll realize that when these normal
aches and pains come up, hopefully minimized by the fact that you're following a good training
program; ATHLEANX.com.
Then you'll realize that training is a lifelong journey that's going to have its ups and downs,
but as long as you can continue on this upward trend you're going to be really good at the
end of the day.
All right, guys.
I'll be back here again in just a few days.
Again, leave your requests down below.
What would you like for me to cover?
There's a lot of injuries that I haven't even covered yet on this channel and I try to do
the ones that you guys want me to do.
So tell me the things I can help you with that way, and whatever topics you want to
see, and I'll do my best to do that.
All right, guys.
I'll talk to you again soon.
See ya!