Are you sick of getting injured or seeing your friends sidelined by injury?

Four of my close friends are in physical therapy (PT) or doing at-home PT. I joined their ranks when I started physical therapy in February for a laundry list of aches and pains.

Elbow pain, ankle stiffness, and a ripping sensation in my Achilles tendon kept me from sports I love and regular exercise. These pains accumulated over years of overzealous exercise. Before going to PT, I tried to diagnose and cure the issues independently. I dove into great books about joint pain, rehab exercises, and becoming “bulletproof.” I learned a few important things about training and injury.

“It’s the rapid increases and fluctuations in training loads that cause injury.”

“Consistent, intense training is the best way to prevent injury.”

These lines from Built from Broken by Scott Hogan are followed immediately by:

“This is the most important injury-prevention lesson in the book: being sedentary all week and then playing golf or tennis on the weekend is the easiest way to get injured and develop joint pain. Even within daily time periods, being sedentary all day and then exercising intensely for one hour will lead to injury. It might show up as tendinopathy, or it might be an acute tear or sprain. But it will happen.”

I always pay attention when an author calls out the most important lesson in their book. This lesson revealed the flaw in my approach to exercise my whole life.

I got too motivated, got my ego involved, did too much, and quit due to injury or burnout. I wanted to be good, or fit, or fast TOO SOON! I had enough self-belief (an important ingredient in changing one’s life), but my strategy was ineffective. 

The story of The Push-Up Challenge illustrates the problem with my approach.

In March 2019, I hosted a push-up challenge with 10 friends. Whoever did the most push-ups over the month would win the challenge. The prize? Almost a year of wrist pain. But that’s jumping ahead.

I did 200 push-ups the month before the challenge. The month before that, we did a running challenge. I ran over 100 miles (mostly wearing a weight vest) and stopped because of shin splints. It’s embarrassing that I didn’t realize my problem until reading Hogan’s book.

I started doing push-ups on March 1st. I started slow, did 50 push-ups the first day, and added a few more each day. I didn’t start slow to avoid injury. It was mainly to avoid getting sore. The threat of immediate pain (soreness) gave me pause, but long-term pain wasn’t on my radar.  

By week 2, I was doing 100-200 push-ups daily and finished the week with around 2,000.

I knew I’d have to do more than that to win the competition. I figured I’d have to do a crazy amount that none of the other contenders would think to do. For whatever reason, I thought no one would care enough about the competition to do 7,000 push-ups. I’d be in the clear if I did a little more than 7,000.

So I kept pushing. I’d take breaks at work to bang out 25 or 50 push-ups, sometimes still wearing my call center headset. Toward the end of the month, I was doing around 400 push-ups a day. That’s double in a day what I used to do in a month. Admittedly, I was getting stronger, which felt like a great benefit of doing the challenge.

My ego was on the line, and I wanted to win. In a final effort, I did over 700 push-ups on the last day of the month to end with 7,300.

The challenge participants came together to share their numbers.  

“5, and that’s more than I expected,” said our friend who had joined the challenge out of solidarity but with no intention of doing endless push-ups.

“200.”

“1200. I knew I wouldn’t win, but I did some here and there,” said another competitor.

“4,500,” Decker said, earning nods of approval.

“7,001,” my biggest competition said smugly. Somehow we’d both settled on the 7,000 as an unreasonable amount.

“7,300,” I said, trying not to smile from ear to ear. I won and felt pretty cool! I was proud–probably not in a good way.

I told my dad about the challenge and my victory. Wisely, he said I should try to keep doing 100 push-ups a day after the challenge. I remember being internally dismissive of the old man’s suggestion and outwardly saying, “Sure, good idea.” I didn’t even want to think about another push-up. I was more interested in satisfying my short-term ego and utterly uninterested in long-term health.

“It’s the rapid increases and fluctuations in training loads that cause injury.”

A few weeks later, I had a mysterious sharp pain in my wrist and lost mobility in my thumb. It was almost as if I’d done over 7,000 loaded movements on a joint that was used to 200 in a typical month. Almost…

I didn’t connect the push-up challenge to my pain until months later. The pain lingered for a year, and I had no idea where it came from. I wore a wrist and thumb brace to stabilize the area and gasped when something banged my arm. I thought something was wrong with my body because things like this happened often.

I don’t think my body was the problem. My approach was. I threw myself into new sports, workouts, and running, trying to prove I was athletic and tough. I never stuck with anything long enough to see lasting results and often hurt myself. I was overly ambitious and underly patient. I didn’t do things with the long-term in mind. I wanted to satisfy my ego as quickly as possible by doing things my body wasn’t prepared to do. I wanted to impress myself, not improve myself.

You may have had similar experiences. If you’re into personal development, I imagine you’ve gone through spurts of motivation where you get ultra-dedicated to something and dive right in. It could be a diet, a workout, quitting a habit, or an educational program. Soon, your motivation flags, you’re tired, and you quit.

I blame ego, overdoing it, and not knowing better. Now that I know better, I’m quick to remind myself to play the long game. My approach now is to put in consistent light work until that becomes normal. By slowly increasing the demands I put on myself, I believe I will avoid injury and burnout.  

“Consistent, intense training is the best way to prevent injury.”

Consistency is key. Powerful, lasting results come from action over time. Injury interrupts progress. By pushing too hard in the name of results, we can take ourselves out of the game so that we have to recover before we can play again. Better to play the game every day and lock in our gains without injury.

So, if you agree, please start slow. Don’t hype yourself up and bite off more than you can chew. Commit, start small, and plan to do it over the long term. You will go so much further. Maybe we’ll see each other there. 

Today’s tip: increase the demands on yourself a little bit at a time. Don’t dive in with an unsustainable plan. Do the unglamorous, unsexy, easy workouts consistently until you can do more of them or begin adding in slightly more challenging workouts.  

Eventually, you’ll earn the right to do hard workouts consistently without risking injury. Others will see your effort and want to jump right to your level, but they won’t have built the solid foundation to do it safely. Don’t be like them. Don’t be like the old me. And whatever you do, please don’t do 7,000 push-ups in a month after doing 200 the month before.