The Recovering Athlete: 孫子兵法 ("The Art of War")

"兵之形, 避實而擊虛."  

("So in war, the way is to avoid what is strong and strike at what is weak.")

--Sun Tzu, The Art of War

If my last blog post wasn't evidence enough, the past 7 weeks have been a test of my patience, my sanity, and my ability to believe in a light at the end of this injury tunnel.  It has been nearly 2 months since my back went out on me.  In that time, I have gone through some seriously dark sh*t, and now that I finally have begun to turn the corner with measurable improvements in my condition, I have been able to start gathering together everything I've learned in this process, and want to start sharing it all. This experience, I know, will be well worth it's weight in gold in the end.

The first four to five weeks of my journey were some of the darkest times I've ever experienced in my life, ever.  If you want insight on that time, read my last blog post:  The Injured Athlete: Why it Took Me So Long to Write This.  

Kent had THREE herniated discs at one point. He made
 a full recovery without the need for surgery.

After 3 weeks of acute chiropractic therapy, my back finally began to stabilize and I was introduced to my physical therapist, Kent.  Kent has been working on addressing the great number of things wrong with my body for the past 4 weeks, and he's been nothing short of amazing.  A former competitor himself, the injuries Kent sustained from overtraining, overly aggressive weight routines, and general lack of observation of developing injuries, eventually cut his bodybuilding career short.  But through his own rehabilitation process, he developed a desire to devote the rest of his career to training and treating injured athletes in an effort not only to treat their ailments, but also to change their mentality through education so that the athlete could train sustainably in the future.

I intend to share everything I have learned (and  continue to learn) from my sessions with Kent in this blog.  But for now, I want to focus on one conversation I had with him last weekend.  I'm going to call this the "Sun Tzu / Art of War" talk. Here's the backstory.

I was on the table getting ready for some ART therapy in my lower lumbar, and Kent and I were talking about sustainable athleticism.  We spoke a lot about the wide variety of injuries common amongst athletes, and how most of them almost always effect the spine to some degree.  We talked about baseball injuries, soccer injuries, triathletes, marathon runners, you name it.  Kent said to me, "You see those super competitive triathletes out there?  The ones who don't have an ounce of body fat, and all look like the endurance-version of Superman?  Don't be fooled, they're ALL injured.  They are ALL on my table."  So I asked Kent, despairingly, "Is there any way to be a competitive athlete, but still be able to preserve your body so that injuries like this don't occur??"  Kent's response:  "The second anyone decides they want to compete or strive for real greatness, fitness from a health and wellness standpoint immediately takes back seat."

This was a shock to me; I never have thought about how my health and fitness goals might actually be affecting my overall health and fitness in a negative way.  I know that moderation is key, but I still never thought that my ambitious athletic pursuits could all actually be doing more harm than good, from an accumulative stand point.  But then common sense kicked in; we preach so much about pushing ourselves; "No excuses", "no days off", and all those other mantras.  We praise people who push harder, who don't quit… and rightly we should! But when people have too much zeal, their pain tolerance goes up.  They, like me, are more prone to skipping rest days.  They get used to the toils of training and can't distinguish between good and bad pain.  They choose to push through injuries instead of stopping ("Only quitters quit!").  And they tend to continue to push harder as their thirst for "better, better, better!" gets stronger, stronger, stronger.

You can see how large my quads here; you can't see
how much bigger they are than my hamstrings.

My back injury is a result of various factors. First, my spine has been strained and sheered by an unnatural degree of pull on it from my pelvis.  My pelvis is rotated forward because it is being pulled straight down by my quads.  My quads are FULL of scar tissue from old injuries, my IT bands are as hard as concrete, and my quads in general are overdeveloped in relation to my glutes and hamstrings.  This has effectively rendered the back of my legs useless in trying to pull my pelvis back into place, which then has put a lot of pull and strain on my spinal erectors as they fight to keep my spine straight and in place against the force of my quads. My glutes and hamstrings are weak because (a) I haven't trained them properly and proportionately, and (b) because, between school and then an office job, I have basically been sitting for 8+ hours a day for the past 25 years of my life.  2 hours of working out a day cannot offset sitting for 8 hours.  Sitting down for that long ruins your hip flexors, allows your quads to tighten up, and stretches out your hams and glutes, which just adds to their inability to pull the pelvis back and in place when tight strong quads are pulling it forward.  Add on top of this two instances when I was told I had piriformis syndrome which I treated with oral steroids (and NO physical therapy…wtf was I thinking!??), when in actuality I had sprained my lower back, as evidenced by all of the scar tissue currently surrounding my injured vertebrae.  I pushed through the pain, I rushed the healing process of injuries (or didn't treat them at all!) and I continued to build my program harder and stronger.  I was a ticking time bomb.

Note how muscles both directly and indirectly affixed to the spine and pelvis, go all the way down to the knee!  Knee pain is often a symptom of -- or precursor to -- back injuries.

So, back to the Art of War...  

Kent told me that there is a way to be a healthy, competitive athlete, and a way to stay a healthy, competitive athlete, but it requires common sense which, at first glance, may look counter-intuitive.  He said that for whatever sport you do or compete in, you must, MUST ensure that you train opposing muscle groups in the gym.  He said that many athletes think that since their sport requires them to do or be strong in certain movements, then that's what they should be training in the gym.  While it is important to develop those muscles and agility and motor skills in what is required of you, it is perhaps even more so important to train and develop the muscles and movements in your body that are NOT worked out as much in your sport.  Why? You must stay balanced! Your body should maintain a uniform level of muscular development.  Too much of one muscle group will overpower the other, and wham! Injury.  Too strong of one muscle group in relation to another will cause you to subconsciously move differently, which in turn puts strain on joints, ligaments, and other tissues that aren't being moved properly.  Kent said you have to attack the weak spots, not the strong ones.

"The Art of War" is an ancient military treatise authored by Sun Tzu, a legendary Chinese military general, sometime in the 6th century B.C.  There are a great number of proverbs that come from the book, and one of them goes as such: "兵之形, 避實而擊虛."  Or, in English, "Avoid what is strong, and strike at what is weak."  Of course, Sun Tzu was talking about how to efficiently overthrow a foe.  But when Kent told me that the training program I follow for the rest of my life must be engineered to attack the weak spots, not the strong ones, I immediately thought of Sun Tzu.

Goals are kind of like war:  Your mind is set on them, you develop a strategy, and you don't stop until you either succeed or you surrender.  My body is a battlefield that has seen it's fair share of bloodshed :/  But I know now that, while being a competitor (of any sorts) will require a certain degree of risk and sacrifice, if approached properly, one can develop one's body in nearly perfect balance by focusing not on making the strong parts stronger, but bringing the weak spots up to speed.

As such, when I am finally healed and Kent helps me engineer a training program, you can bet your boots it will be chock full of hamstring and glute exercises and deadlifts, and there will be a striking absence of the incline leg press… possibly forever?  And I will most certainly share this program when I have it!

That's all, for now :)