I haven’t started an article with a movie quote in a long time, so let’s kick this one off with an oldie but goodie. Most of you have seen Happy Gilmore, I hope. Even though many of Adam Sandler’s films have tanked in recent years, nothing will ever diminish the genius of that one. Most of the people I really like can quote a few lines from it. I could almost do the whole flick by memory, but one of my favorite moments is when Happy is getting ready to putt in a big tournament and that annoying heckler pops his head up and says, “You WILL not make this PUTT, you JACKASS!”

That one came to mind when I was thinking about the subject of this article. We’re going to talk about minor injuries, you see. A “minor injury” is something that’s painful enough to delay (or temporarily halt) your training, but doesn’t require surgery. Things like muscle pulls, strains, contusions, impingements, and the like…that’s what we’re dealing with. Now that I’ve been a weightlifter for a very long time, I think it would be funny if that heckler from Happy Gilmore popped his head up when you’re doing one of your first O-Lifting workouts and said, “You WILL have MINOR INJURIES, you JACKASS!”

They’re basically guaranteed, you see. If you train really hard for any sustained length of time, you’ll have some boo-boos. I would never lie and say otherwise. But your injuries will most likely be minor, like the ones I described above. You’ll probably be able to get rid of them just by taking some time off, icing, getting some treatment help, etc. These types of pains are manageable. They won’t be permanent and they won’t seriously jeopardize your health. The big injuries that have to be repaired by a surgeon? You probably won’t have those. They might happen, but the odds are against it if you train intelligently.

I’ve written about injuries before, but this particular analysis is going to focus on something new. We’re going to look at the concept of “working around an injury.” This is something you might have heard about before, but let me briefly explain it anyway. When you get hurt, you obviously have to back off your training so the injury can heal. Common sense. But if you’re a hardcore lifter, you don’t want to take any time off. Chances are you’ve probably got a meet coming up soon, and you’ve got some big weights you want to hit each week as you prepare for it. You’re motivated to work, and there’s no time to waste. Then you get a minor injury and you don’t want to stop lifting, but the injury basically forces your hand. You can’t do certain lifts and movements because the pain prohibits you, so you ask yourself, “What are some alternative lifts I can do temporarily to stay strong without agitating the injury?” Even if you can’t train exactly the way you want while you’re hurt, you’re willing to try other exercises if they’ll keep you from losing strength while you recover. Anything is better than nothing.

I’ve had to do this several times throughout my career, and you’ll probably have to do it, too. So we’re going to take a look at some basic strategies and ideas for the best way to work around an injury in weightlifting. It sucks that we even have to talk about this, I know. But unless you want to quit lifting and take up knitting, it’s a fact of life and it’s better to just attack it directly.

The Procedure…

Let me show you a nice easy way to do this. I’m a pretty organized thinker, so I’ll give you an example of how to work around an injury using a simple lift that many of you probably don’t do…the bench press.

Let’s say you’re training your bench press and you’re really cranking up the intensity of your workouts. Then, you get a minor injury one day. Let’s say the injury is a pulled pectoral (chest) muscle. You know it’s not major and you’re not going to need surgery or anything. You’ll just have to back off from working that injured pec until it heals. Obviously you want to keep training and stay strong while you’re healing, so you need to figure out a way to work around the injury. Here’s a checklist you can go through, along with some answers that would fit this bench press example:

Question: What is your main training focus?
Answer: bench press

Question: Which body part is injured?
Answer: pectoral muscle

Question: Which lifts will you have to stop doing while the injury heals?
Answer: bench press, and any other lift that uses the pectoral muscle to a degree that agitates the injury

Question: Which other muscle groups need to stay strong in order to keep your bench pressing strength while the injured pec heals?
Answer: triceps, deltoids, upper back, biceps

Question: What lifts will keep those muscle groups strong without agitating the injured pec?
Answer: tricep extensions, overhead military press and other dumbbell exercises designed for deltoid strength, upper back exercises such as bent over rows, lat pulls, shrugs, etc., bicep curls

Now you have a basic plan of attack. You won’t be able to bench heavy while the pec heals. You just have to swallow that. But there are a lot of other things you can do that will strengthen the other muscles involved in the bench press without making the injury any worse. If you look at the answer to that last question, you’ve basically got a battery of lifts that you can build a training plan with. As long as they don’t agitate that injured pec, they’re okay. Then hopefully, within a short amount of time, the pec will be healed and you’ll be ready to start back with light bench pressing again, working your way back up in weight carefully and gradually. Your strength is still good because of the work you did with the other exercises, and you haven’t fallen far behind where you were before you got hurt. Voila, you worked around the injury and now you’re back on track.

I know it’s not that simple…

Obviously, the bench pressing example is an easy one. Benching is a simple upper body movement that doesn’t have the same level of complexity and total-body involvement as the Olympic lifts. So I know what you’re thinking. How can you apply the checklist we went through for bench pressing to an injury that affects the snatch, clean and jerk, and squats?

Well, let’s just try it out. For this example, let’s say you’re an Olympic lifter and you pop a hamstring pull. How the hell can we work around a hamstring pull in the O-Lifts?

Question: What is your main training focus?
Answer: the Olympic lifts and squats

Question: Which body part is injured?
Answer: hamstring

Question: Which lifts will you have to stop doing while the injury heals?
Answer: anything that involves pulling with the hamstring, which will probably include the main Olympic lifts (SN, C&J) and pull-related assistance exercises, squats will probably be affected too

Question: Which other muscle groups need to stay strong in order to keep your Olympic lifting strength while the injured hamstring heals?
Answer: quadriceps, trapezius and other back muscles, upper body muscles involved in jerking and overhead positions (deltoids, etc.), core muscles

Question: What lifts will keep those muscle groups strong without agitating the injured hamstring?

Because the Olympic lifts are so complex, let’s give a more detailed answer. Here are some lifting exercises you could do to work around an injured hamstring if you’re an O-Lifter:

Quadriceps: Since regular squats will probably agitate the injured hamstring, you could do box squats to keep your quadriceps strong. I know this sounds ridiculous for an O-Lifter because box squats are generally considered a powerlifting movement that has no real application to the O-Lifts. However, you would be surprised at how much quad strength you can maintain by setting a box (or bench) behind you at a height that keeps you at parallel depth when you sit back on it. When you do the box squats, just literally sit down on it and then stand up. You’ll probably squat using more of a sit-back powerlifting low bar style, but that’s a good thing. This will allow you to handle heavy weights without irritating the injured hamstring. I know this sounds fishy, but trust me. I’m a full-blooded O-Lifter and I’ve done it myself when I absolutely had to. I’ve also used box squats to work around patellar tendonitis.

Trapezius and other back muscles: You can do standing barbell shrugs without using your legs, right? Go as heavy as you want and just blast your traps. For the other muscles of the back, don’t be afraid to do some bodybuilding-type exercises like lat pulls, bent-over rows, dumbbell lateral raises, etc. Once again, this sounds stupid because you’re an O-Lifter and you don’t want to do a bunch of bodybuilding crap. But just remember, it’s only temporary. Just like box squats, you’re not going to do this stuff forever. It’s alternative work to keep you strong while you’re hurt. Suck up your pride and do it.

Upper body muscles involved in jerking and overhead positions: You can do practically anything you want here, as long as it doesn’t involve a lot of movement from the lower body. Standing military presses, behind-the-neck snatch grip presses, more bodybuilding stuff for the upper body, etc.

Core muscles: Almost any type of abdominal exercise will be fine. Hammer your core as hard as you want while you’re waiting for that hammy to heal up.

This will work. You don’t think so? Well, I’ve personally done exactly what I just described to work around an injured hamstring, and it was effective. The injury cleared up over time, and I didn’t notice any kind of problematic decrease in my O-Lifts when I started training again. Once I tested the hamstring to make sure it was fully healed (pain-free range of motion), I started back with the O-Lifts and squats using VERY light weights. When I was sure the pain was gone, I started gradually bumping up the weights slowly over the course of the next few weeks. Before I knew it, I was back to full strength and I wasn’t hurt anymore.

The real issue…

You want to know the hardest part of the whole thing, really? It’s mentally accepting the fact that you have to stop doing the O-Lifts for a while and replace them with a bunch of stupid lifts you don’t want to do. This is a tough pill to swallow, believe me. When you’re a serious Olympic lifter, the thought of giving up snatches or clean and jerks for a few weeks while you replace them with box squats, military presses, and a bunch of bodybuilding work makes you want to puke. That stuff is boring, and you’re totally freaked out that you might lose all of the skill and strength you worked so hard to build in your competition lifts. This is even harder if you train in a gym full of other hardcore O-Lifters, because you have to watch them hitting big lifts and kicking ass while you’re stuck in some back corner of the gym doing replacement injury lifting.

You’ll be tempted to come back too early, when you know damn well you’re not 100 percent ready. If you do this, you’ll probably get hurt again. And it will most likely be worse than it was the first time. Before you know it, you’ve taken an injury that could have healed up in two weeks and you’ve stretched it out into two months because you just weren’t patient enough to give it the rest it needed.

This can be maddening. I’ve said it many times…being injured is the worst feeling in the world. Being injured is worse than training like crap. When you’re training like crap, at least you still get to lift with everybody else. When you’re injured, you completely fall out of the mix. After a couple of weeks have gone by, you start to feel like you’re not even in the game anymore.

Brothers and sisters, now we see just another example of why Olympic weightlifting is so freaking hard. When you think about the difficulty of this sport, you think about how challenging it is to master the technique and the brutal training. But the toil of weightlifting extends way beyond that. You will have minor injuries, period. And when they happen, you’ll learn about a whole new realm of frustration as you force yourself to back off and work around the injury with a program of stupid, boring exercises that you don’t enjoy. It’s a whole new type of mental war you have to fight, sitting idle and patiently waiting for your muscles to heal when all you want to do is get back to work.

Well, there’s always an alternative, and I’m going to take this opportunity to repeat something I’ve said in previous articles. If any of this is too tough for you, maybe you should just quit. Admit you’re not strong enough to handle it, and just walk away. There’s no shame in admitting that you didn’t have the inner fortitude to deal with the mountain of challenges you’re going to encounter in your road as a weightlifter. Just give up. Go sit in your house, smoke dope, eat Cheetos, and relax.

What’s that? You say you’re not a quitter? You refuse to give up, even when it gets tough? You’ll force yourself to have the mental discipline to work around your injuries while they heal? Good, I’m glad to hear it. Maybe you’ll have a future in this sport after all.