Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Injuries

For me they come in bunches. About a month ago I hurt my toe coming down from a handstand in a cramped space, and hitting it on a hard part of the couch. The toe is all better now, but a couple weeks ago I strained an intercostal muscle (one of the muscles on the chest that controls expansion of the rib cage. At first when I injured it I thought I tore my pec, so I rushed to the bathroom to have a look at it in the mirror. I expected to see some nasty sight like this:

Torn Pectoral Muscle


I was relieved to see my ordinay pecs starring back at me. I'm pretty sure I hurt the intercostal because I had been focusing on upper body work due to my toe injury.

For those of us addicted to exercise it is tempting to work around injuries. I think that is fine so long as you don't take the extra time that would have been spent on the injured area and use it to increase focus on the healthy parts. This is not the first time that I doubled my injuries by putting 100% of my focus on a few bodyparts, and I'm guessing others might find the same thing.

How do you guys deal with injury, does it depress you, do you appreciate the break?

4 comments:

  1. I think I tore a muscle in my pectoralis minor( or chest). It happened when doing bench presses and coughing sneezing and laughing hurt like hell. Moving my left arm or left upper side of my body is so painful. I'm going to give it a few days/week rest and if that doesn't help I'm going to go crazy. I don't have money for a checkup or surgery or anything. Weight lifting is really the only thing I do in my spare time, If I lose that I don't know what to do. My pecs look... they dont match up.

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  2. Bro I feel for you. I'm the same way, when I get injured I feel so depressed. It feels like things will never get back on track. Where is the irregularity on your chest, inside by the sternum or outside by your arm pits.

    I did end up noticing an irregularity in my pecs as a result of that injury but I went back and found an old pic from college and it turns out that I have always had it.

    What I'm saying is you may have torn it you may not have, and it must be driving you crazy. Just know this though, life goes on.

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  3. It's more on the outside by my armpit. Yeah I'm kind of in limbo not knowing if it's really serious or not. And I keep resting feeling the setback.

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  4. I tore mine pectorales of to, using lot of mony to go to profesonals doctors, they sad the chance for getting it better with operation is so small and the chanse for getting worse is there. And that i would never forgive doctor ore mye self if i operate and it got worse. You must operate the same day ore at least the same week (14 days ) it happend. Im going to fysoterapeut and trains up my body. i feel like dying, woprst thnig happend to me, I couldalmost kill for this damage chest to never happend. worst thing in my life. looks like the picture u show us.

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