A quick thought on the Grinch and victimhood
My wife’s a Christmas fanatic. Our house has been decorated for weeks and I think she’s already watched every Christmas movie known to man-kind before December started.
I don’t like The Grinch, but something caught my attention the other day. His schedule includes:
- 4:00pm- wallow in self pity
- 4:30pm- stare into the abyss
- 7:00pm- slip slowly into madness
- 9:00pm- wrestle w/ self-loathing
It’s funny, because it’s true.
So many people adopt a victim-mindset. “My life is so difficult. I’m SO busy. I can’t believe that happened to me. Poor me.”
Here’s a harsh newsflash: everyone is busy. (Wearing your busy badge isn’t a medal of honor, everyone has one.)
Everyone’s struggling with stuff in their life. Everyone faces tough luck sometimes.
For goodness sake, have some self-agency.
YOU have control over your life. You can decide how you react to what life throws at you. You can mold your existence into what you want it to be.
Adopting a perpetual victim-mindset is one of the most repulsive traits a human being can have. Yes, it’s normal and healthy to have times of feeling sorry for yourself. Just don’t stay in there.
As Kobe Bryant said, “We don’t speak the same language. I don’t understand you. I don’t want to understand you.”
A deep dive on preventing injuries
How can someone make the same cut 100 times in a row and then tear their ACL on the 101st time?
How can a professional athlete, whose health is worth millions of dollars, tear an achilles during a mundane takeoff?
Injury prevention is the holy grail of athletic development. Professional teams, individually worth billions of dollars, are pouring money into injury prediction models to keep their star athletes healthy and on the field.
If you want to avoid injuries, here’s what you need to know.
- Completely avoiding injuries is impossible
I would drain my personal and business bank accounts, take a second mortgage out on my house, and empty my daughter’s 529 to learn a proven system that eliminates all injuries from happening.
It just doesn’t exist.
Injuries are going to happen.
There are people on the internet (and local physical therapy clinics) who will swear that if you follow exactly what they say, then you’ll be bullet-proof and never get hurt again.
They’re scammy, narcissistic snake-oil salesmen.
Run from them, fast.
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Humans are the most complex things on earth. Pain is the most complex aspect of the human experience.
The amount of variables that can result in an injury is astronomical. Most of those variables are changing by the millisecond, which amplifies the uncertainty exponentially.
Every injury prediction model known to man is useless in real word practice.
Not only are we terrible at predicting when they’re going to occur, we normally can’t even explain why an injury happened after it already occurred.
Hindsight is supposed to be 20/20, but we’re looking through 20/500 goggles when analyzing injuries.
2. Strategic training can reduce injury risk
Relax, here’s where the depressing news ends.
We may not know exactly why injuries happen. We may not be able to prevent all injuries from happening. But, we can for darn sure reduce our injury risk.
It’s all an odds game.
Think of it this way- there are 3 buckets of coins in front of you. They’re all filled with red and green coins. If you pull out a red coin, you get hurt. If you pull out a green coin, you stay healthy.
- The first bucket has a bunch of red coins and a handful of green coins.
- The second bucket has a 50% red coins and 50% green coins.
- The third bucket has a bunch of green coins and a handful of red coins.
Smart, consistent, and strategic training shifts you from choosing from the first bucket to choosing from the last bucket.
Many of the injury risk factors are influenced positively by the same general training principles. So, while we might not know exactly why you’re staying healthier, the outcome is the same.
Importantly, even if you’re choosing from the third bucket, there are still red coins in there. You can do everything right and still draw the short straw.
The good news is that if you’re training and managing loads appropriately, then you will get hurt less often than you otherwise would. When you do get hurt, it will be less severe than it otherwise would and you will recover quicker than you otherwise would.
3. Performance and health are at odds
Performance ≠ Health
We can’t get it twisted.
If you are trying to maximize your genetic potential for athletic performance, you are sometimes going to push beyond your limits.
There are two types of performance/health trade-offs: ones that are worth it and ones that aren’t.
Only you can decide what’s worth it for you, but here’s my two cents.
- If an injury has long-term repercussions or hampers long-term development, it’s not worth it.
- If an injury is short-lived and inconsequential from a “birds-eye” view of your entire life, then it’s probably worth it.
I started every game of my high school football career from freshman through senior season. Toward the end of the regular season in my senior year, I pulled my hamstring during a Monday conditioning workout.
We were coming up on playoffs and every game mattered; it was important for me to be out there. I bought a $100, ultra-compressive pair of compression shorts that claimed to be good for hamstring strains, and pushed through that Friday night.
I risked hurting it worse, but the risk was worth it. If I made the hamstring strain worse that night, my life course wouldn’t have been any different.
If we’re messing around with growth plates, hormonal disruptions, fractures, and some other stuff, the game changes and the risk:reward ratio shifts.
4. Movement itself is a risk factor, but the reward outweighs the risk ten-fold
The best way to never get into a car accident is to never get in a car.
The best way to never get injured is to never move.
Movement and exercise are, in and of themselves, risk-factors for getting certain injuries. You’re surely not going to sprain your ankle while laying on the couch.
But, the rewards that comes along with movement and exercise drastically outweigh the risks.
I’d way rather have a little nagging knee pain that rears its head every few months than have a heart attack.
Just like driving a car improves our quality of life so much that we accept the risk of getting into a car accident, movement and exercise improve our quality of life so much that we need to accept that every now and then, they’re going to cause an injury.
Look, no one wants an answer to eliminating pain and injury more than me. It destroys me when one of our athletes gets injured.
I’ve learned to stay calm, cool, collected, and nonchalant when talking with our athletes about their injuries.
Excessively worrying about an injury only makes it hurt worse and the recovery take longer (the influence that emotions have over our pain experience is worthy of an entire newsletter by itself).
Internally, though, I’m desperate for answers.
Just ask my wife. It’s a common experience in our house for her to roll over and find my spot of the bed empty at 3am. I’ll be at the computer pouring through data, training logs, and research trying to figure out what went wrong and how we can do better next time.
At the end of the day, sometimes there is no answer and there’s nothing that can be done differently. The odds just weren’t in our favor in that moment.
Injuries are going to happen in life. You are going to feel pain at times in your life.
You need to get comfortable dealing with that pain and the uncertainty that comes along with it.
Successfully dealing with pain and uncertainty sure sounds like a valuable life skill that I want my daughter to have when she enters the real world as an adult.
The moments that sports give us as kids are invaluable learning experiences if we use them as such.
Be >,
Zach
Dr. Zach Guiser, PT, DPT, CSCS