Injuries suck and we absolutely should do EVERYTHING that we can to avoid them both personally and with our clients

BUT

They will happen…

So what do we do once the shit hits the fan?

In the video above I describe what to look for with shoulder injuries (one of my boys aggravated his bicep tendon and wanted to get back to benching pain free), there is always a few things that I recommend to do no matter what injury is in question

1. Get it diagnosed buy a professional – my go to is an osteopath and as a pro tip for you strength coaches out there I would recommend finding a good one who has fixed you at some point and teaming up with them

We have a great Osteo who runs his business from within Royale Fitness and the most important part within our relationship is that we work openly to fix our athletes

Get an Osteo who doesn’t just give the old “rest that slightly strained calf for 6 weeks and see me every week, then we can look at setting up a rehab plan to get you back to lifting weights” <— I fucking hate these nerds BTW…

You want to find someone who understands that you’re not some shitty trainer who thinks burpees are the ultimate cardio exercise and Tabata was some god of Egypt who created the only way to do anything (this is what most health professionals think of us by the way and why they tell people to rest)

Anyway, once you find a great professional to diagnose and treat the injury the next step is talking to them about what is safe and unsafe to do in their return to full training plan

2. Blood Flow Is KING

Load the tissue to 80% of the maximal capacity IT CAN CURRENTLY HANDLE but no further…

You may be thinking I am nuts here (I am) but no I am not saying that you should crank up Motley Crew on Spotify, sniff some smelling salts and get under the bar ready to fuck shit up…

What I mean by this is you want to move through the movements that don’t hurt like normal but anything that your professional said should be avoided or modified you only want to load it to what it can handle PRODUCTIVELY

An example of this is one of my boys tore his pec and deltoid in a BJJ class and couldn’t move his shoulder

He is stubborn as a brick wall so he wanted to train even before he had seen our Osteo as he thought it would just come good (some people won’t listen even if you have all the knowledge in the world and they trust you, these are the guys and girls that you need to strategically coach into making the right decision for themselves <— More on this another day)

What I did was allow him to do bench pressing but with a piece of dowel and at first this was a huge battle for him but I was just trying to keep him getting blood flow with the safest maximal load he could handle

He can bench 150kg so a broom stick painfully moving through the range is no where near his 1RM but this is all he could handle for now

Over time (and after he gave in and got it all looked at by our Osteo) we were able to get him to do a bunch of hard back and tricep work as he added 1kg plates to his stick and built it all back up from there

Just always remember that doing nothing DOES NOTHING

Get treated and get blood flow in and things will heal faster

3. Program Like A Responsible Genius

If you want your body to look like shit and feel like shit and get injured frequently just train the front half

If you want to be an animal, look confident and lower the chance of injury dramatically train the back half twice as much

What do I mean by this?

There is a ratio that I have adhered to for years in my programs

1:2 Push to Pull

This is referring to volume and load

An example is this would look like

Bench 5×5 at 100kg = 2500kg

Simple math to double this would be Barbell Row 5×10 at 100kg = 5000kg

Another way you may do it is have

Barbell Row 3x 12 at 85kg = 3060kg

Pull Up 5×8 (85kg man) = 3400kg

So this simply would adhere to the 1:2 minimum but is almost 1:3 ration (which is how we generally go about it at RF if you look over the total weeks volume)

PRO TIP: Don’t only use 1:2 ratio for push:pull apply this to

Horizontal Pull: Vertical Pull also and you will find this improves things EVEN more

Anyway that is enough for today, I would highly recommend that you watch the video in this post for deeper details on how to get back to smashing the iron again

Stay Strong

Matt ‘From Experience’ Prince

P.S. If you are already having success in your coaching business or training but just want more results and success faster, check out our resources and how we can help also feel free to hit me up on any of the socials and I will be happy to help 🙂