I get it, the question comes across tongue in cheek, but in reality, it’s our choice and it really is just that simple. As a strength and conditioning Coach and gym owner, something I hear too often is a request to quit strength training because of “x” injury. Or to quit training completely because of a feeling that if there was not training, then the injury wouldn’t have happened in the first place.
To be absolutely clear, movement is medicine and it is the most cost effective, most underutilized, and under prescribed medicine bar none. And this is not just the opinion of a gym owner and coach. There are mountains, avalanches of scientific data to back it up. Data that says if we keep our bodies strong, we feel better and live longer and if we don’t move, we get ill and do not live as long.
Some of you may know that most of my career I have been practicing as a critical care nurse and only recently became a gym owner. Why? That’s a pretty hard left turn, right?
Not if you have seen what I’ve seen. I have spent too many years watching people suffer and/or die in front of my very eyes from preventable chronic diseases. Heart disease, kidney disease, strokes, diabetes, obesity, and the list goes on. Or, they became ill from something else, maybe an accident or something unpreventable but then had so many other preventable but chronic comorbidities that they could not make a complete recovery or the complications led to death.
So, that’s it. Maybe you have been having back pain from swinging a kettlebell incorrectly, or from a dead lift or your shoulder has tendinitis and you can’t currently do anything overhead or maybe you hurt your knee or hip or foot during strength training. I promise you, I have felt that disappointment from an injury too. All that momentum that you built before the injury is lost.
My advice is to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, put your pride on the shelf, seek out and accept coaching, take the modifications, lower or lose the weights while you recover the injury, but please don’t stop strength training. It is the absolute worst thing you can do!
Back to that left turn I took to become a gym owner and coach. I often tell people that I have joined team prevention. And that’s exactly it. DSC is ground zero in the battle against preventable chronic diseases. We are absolutely obsessed with keeping you moving, challenging your strength and keeping you safe while doing so. It is literally why we exist!
What are we willing to do to keep you moving? Well, you may have seen a member with a whiteboard following a different program, or following a TrainHeroic program from their phone. That’s because those members have shared with us an injury or pain that they have been feeling. Sometimes, we may be able to modify one or two movements from the group programming, but sometimes we will write an entirely different program out. If we have to, we will even put our members in private or semi-private training until they can rejoin the group again.
The bottom line is, if you move and challenge your body, you will experience injury. Without a doubt. What can you do to reduce the chance of injury? Eat healthy foods in the proper amounts, get the appropriate amount of sleep, always do the warm up and cool down, stretch and foam roll often, listen to your coaches, ask your coaches for help. Constantly work to improve your form. Challenge your form first and then increase weights.
I hope that you will read this blog as a lovenote to my gym community and the community I live in. Because that’s how it is intended. Nothing worthwhile is ever easy, right? That goes for being fit and it also goes for the battle of getting/keeping people fit. And we will never quit.
But don’t take my word for it….try us out. Let us wow you and get you feeling your best ever.