Scene: the sweat-soaked, MRSA-ridden, gritty, black stretching mats at the Y. My face is planted in a pool of someone else’s grime while I try and stretch my quads. I am trying not to inhale. Grossed out? It gets better. I look up to see my friend Bobby (Hi, Bobby!!) taking off his running shoe and gasp as his sock is covered in oozy bright red blood, nearly to his ankle. Bobby seems unperturbed. “That’s funny,” he says. “I didn’t even feel anything!”
“Blister?” I ask. I shouldn’t be grossed out – a mother who is a community health ed nurse breeds that out of you right quick – but I suppress a shudder. A better friend would run to get him paper towels and a band-aid. In this instance I don’t even qualify as a decent friend as all I can do is stare.
“Nope,” he answers as he peels off the sock.
Fresh blood can look like a lot more than it is. Now I consider running to get band-aids – to put over my eyes. I blame childbirth. Ever since my little monkeys started spewing bodily fluids I’ve gotten a lot wussier. My mother is not proud.
“Sharp toenail,” he finally declares. I faint.
Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?
My shin splints. Gym Buddy Allison’s rolled ankle. Gym Buddy Candice’s poltergeist rib. Injuries and exercise, sadly, go hand in hand.
Ace bandages and knee braces are the fashion statement du jour on the treadmill. Bruises, wrist straps and weight belts abound on the weight floor (but no, all the shaved heads are not indicative of a mental injury or a Britney fetish – although I’d love to see you ask one of those meatheads about it!)
In fact, if you pick any random person at the gym I bet you a thirty-pound dumbbell dropped on your chest that they have an injury story to tell. If they’re really, um, lucky they even have their very own pet injury – one they can feed & clothe and love just like a Webkin but without the yearly subscription fee!
Do You Really Want to Make Me Cry?
I won’t tell you about the worst exercise injury I’ve ever seen (In high school a soccer player caught his foot in a hole in the grass and went down, breaking his FEMUR. It sounded like a RIFLE going off. The bone came through his SKIN. His coach THREW UP. Sorry, that just popped out. I think I still have PTSD from it.) but I can tell you some things to help avoid exercise injuries.
1. Don’t exercise. Oh, wait. Not an option? Fine. You can do Sit and Be Fit. Mmm… except I bet somebody somewhere has fallen off their chair.
All right – if you exercise you’re going to get hurt. To be fair, if you do anything other than breathe you are going to get injured eventually. Which is why you need to be as smart as you can (wear appropriate clothing, ask for a spot when you need it, stretch properly etc.) but don’t despair when the inevitable occurs. (Knock, knock, knock on wood. Well, at least I think this is wood. If it’s not and I get injured today I’m so suing IKEA.)
Working Around An Injury
1. Rest. I am the worst possible person to talk to about this because as long as I can still get my shoes on, I’m in the gym that day. Hopefully you are not as compulsive as I am. But in case you are, at least try and rest the affected part. If your shins hurt (aHEM), try swimming or bike riding. If your wrists are sore avoid pull-ups and push-ups. The key here is to keep resting your Achilles heel even after it starts to feel better. Depending on the severity of your injury it could take weeks or even months. When I stress-fractured my leg last year I was off all high-impact activity for 6 weeks. If I can do it, anyone can.
Ice, heat, massage and those crazy-fun foam rollers can also do wonders for mild injuries.
2. Get the proper equipment. Don’t let your pride or impeccable fashion sense prevent you from getting those butt-ugly orthopedic shoes or knee brace or basketball goggles (hee!) if you need them. Wear them with pride, bro, wear them with pride!
3. Don’t repeat. This sounds like a total duh but since I am so guilty of this one, I’m going to say it: don’t make the same mistake over again. Even if this means you can’t exercise at the level you used to. If you hurt your knee because you upped your mileage too fast then don’t do it again! Up your mileage slowly next time. Train for the surface you run on. Don’t walk and chew gum at the same time.
4. Strengthen the supporting muscles. I can’t say enough good things about this one. If you have knee pain, do more quad, ham & calf exercises. Stronger legs will help stabilize your knee and help it from going out again. Back pain? Make sure you are doing lots of core exercises. Ask a doc or physical therapist for exercises you can safely do to help with your injured area.
5. Whine a lot. Well, actually, have a good support group. Complaining loudly to a friend makes it feel so much better. Misery loves sympathy:)
AIEEEEE!
I probably shouldn’t ask this but I can’t help myself: what’s the worst exercise injury you’ve ever seen? Have you ever had to work around an injury? Anyone else have a pet injury?
thankfully i've never yet seen a gym related injury (touches wood and whistles) BUT I have noticed lately that whenerv I do chest presses lying down on the bench with the weights lifted over my head that I have a recurring waking nightmare that there exists the possibility that I might drop the weights and knock all my teeth out. Freaks me out NO END!
Is that weird?!
I laughed at the femur story. Sorry, the coach throwing up was just classic.
I managed to give myself a baker's cyst on the back of my knee, most likely through my running.
I also bruise the palm-side of my finger joints through very enthusiastic clapping while I'm a Zumba. I really need to leave my engagement ring at home and just wear the wedding ring.
Oh yeah, I'm a bad ass. If you didn't come to Zumba big, go home. 🙂
I'm REALLY GOOD at number five!
Except for a couple of tumbles while trail running (damn roots) which just resulted in scrapes, my injuries are mostly the wear-and-tear kind. But I make sure to whine about my knees quite frequently!
Oh and that soccer/femur injury story is going to haunt me all day, thankyouverymuch!
Mine are lame (and old, b/c I'm really lazy anymore): broke my little toe in point shoes and kept wearing the point shoes through the end of the year recital (it's still deformed, heh) & scraped all the skin off the front of my right shin (almost) jumping the creek on a run.
Apart from the little-toe thing, I never work through an injury. I have decent pain tolerance, but I respect what my body is telling me.
I fractured my fifth metatarsal in two places in college. I waited two weeks to get it checked out. Fortunately my body compensated by making my foot roll inwards, so no weight went onto my twice fractured bone.
I've managed to avoid serious work-out injuries but I do have a tendency to hit myself with dumbbells and leave lovely pretty bruises all over my legs. Which I forget about until 3 days later, at which stage I freak out because I have no idea what I did.
I did break my toe once at a drama school audition. I completed the audition without being able to put my foot on the floor (needless to say, I didn't get accepted) and then traveled around Europe for 3 weeks with a bandaged toe. It's only a little deformed.
I played tackle football, so I've seen someone's foot on backwards (gah), kneecaps in the wrong places, mangled fingers etc.
From a pretty serious injury (that I ignored and continued to play on) I had knee surgery that removed most of the cartiledge in my knee. My ACL is still wonky. Several fingers are crooked too. I'm currently nursing a tender ankle, and a pulled quad.
Le sigh.
The problem I have is that I get mildly depressed when I'm not active. Plus I feel like my body is letting me down and/or I'm getting old. So I often push through when I shouldn't.
Watching and Weighting – I have actually dropped two 30-lb dumbells on my chest doing chest presses. It wasn't pretty:)
Granite – Ok, WHAT is a baker's cyst?? And your Zumba story is the best thing I've heard all day! I once made my hand swell from slapping the gym floor really hard in my Hip Hop class, lol!
Leamur and Tricia – I've broken my little toe too!! Hurt like crazy.
Gemfit – apparently broken toes are the theme for the day!
Loey – I will be cringing all day thinking about your comment. Eeeek!
there aren't many things that make me squeamish but for some reason, breaking a femur is my most feared injury pretty much EVER. I am not at all kidding that your description just made me feel sick. Like, sitting here at my computer heart racing, feel like vomiting. So, so horrible.
Never had a gym-related injury.
But! (You knew there was a "but," right?) Like Leamur, I have a dance injury, too!
When I was 14, I was dancing ballet in pointe/toe shoes. One day I went up on my toe to do a turn, and the satin on the shoe caught in a teeny-tiny crack in the floor. Everything from my knee up turned, while my shin and my foot stayed in exactly the same place.
There was a LOUD crack, and as I came around and saw my reflection in the mirror, I could see where my kneecap was completely to the side of my leg. My foot went out from under me, and I came down full-weight on that knee, popping it back into place.
The fun part? The idiot doctor MISDIAGNOSED my knee as "strained," so I kept dancing on it (crying through class and everything). When I was 17 I went to a specialist because my knee kept popping out of joint, and he said I'd torn a ligament when I was 14, and that I was lucky to be walking at all, much less dancing. But it healed funny, so my left knee is crooked.
That was my *first* bad injury. 😉
Rollerblades + asphalt=most of the skin on my left knee gone. I was only halfway through the 5-mile loop though, so I kept going and ignored the blood running down my leg. Nothing broken though!
The worst one I witnessed was a soccer game where my friend's face (he was playing in the goal) met another guy's foot and his jaw was broken. You could hear that one clear across the field. Not so much blood and nobody threw up, so not as good (bad?) as the femur story.
The worst? A teacher I work with was playing tag with the kids & stepped in a gopher hole & essentially detached her lower leg from the upper at the knee (held together only by skin).
Second worst injury (not sports related) was when a cafeteria table collapsed suddenly when my brother was standing by it (as a child) – when the teacher removed his shoe to check his foot, the big toe came off in the sock (the teacher vomited & then fainted). This was back in the day, in a small town – the doctor just cleaned up the toe, bandaged it to his foot, & it eventually reattached itself! et
I love this post! I should have taken this advice months ago, as now I can't run!!
Just a few random injuries prior to this year (dropping a plate on my foot – that hurt, being pulled down while running with my dog – that hurt too) but this has been tough. I sprained my pinky doing a kettle bell swing the wrong way (keep all your fingers inside), sprained my ankle doing jumping pull-ups (my trainer was distracted and my box slid forward on me) and pulled a muscle in my back doing bikram yoga – I think I am getting clumsier as I get older –
Yikes Charlotte!!!! I bet that KILLED! *rethinks entire weights prog…*
Injuries? Well yeah, lol!
I'm either injured, or as I like to say, ready for further punishment!
Right now, RFFP, Yay!!
Well, no gym injuries… but I do have a dance injury as well– and recent. I just started taking a jazz dance class again as it was always the best exercise I ever did and I actually liked it. As it had been 14 or so years since I've taken class I bought a new pair of shoes… which came a little big and turned out to be seriously stretchy. I was doing jazz walks across the floor and the was almost clear, when the toe of the shoe I was dragging stretched out and I stepped on it, bringing me down on both knees. Got right back up and kept going, but when I was inspecting the damage at home, turned out I had a decent case of road rash on both knees. It's two weeks later and I'm still healing… but I only missed one day of class and that was because it was seriously oozy and I couldn't bend my knees!
Thank goodness I'm not terribly athletic and don't hang out with athletic people or watch sports on TV, so I can't say I have a good sports-injury story. Though my college boyfriend loved wrestling, so I saw lots of fake-sport injuries involving chairs and fake breasts, do those count?
I mostly walk. I did get a blister the other day, so that sucked. That's about my worse injury. And when I did run, chafing. Nothing juicy here!
Great advice. I've been really lucky… the worst I've got has been falling down and scraping my knees or getting a couple sprained fingers and some bruises.
Always fun to read you!
Me, with as hard as I work out, I have been lucky but I have had to work thru a couple injuries but nothing too crazed. The worst for me was the dog attack last year because I could not even go into the gym for over a week!!!! The other ones, I was able to work thru them & at least do something.
OH, way back when, I did have a toe surgery issues & had to sit out for 3 weeks, that was tough!
Wow, I have also seen a gross soccer injury up close: broken ankle, just HANGING off the leg. eesh.
Ive had plenty of battles with shin splints, but lately my right knee is the bane of my existence.
Gymnastics for 13 years = some wicked scenes. Worst injury I saw was my teammate flying off the bars directly onto her neck. She recovered, but man that looked bad. Worst injury I had besides the myriad of ankle sprains (I have one caught on tape because it was during a competition floor routine and it still gives me the heebie jeebies to see it – I have nightmares about twisting my ankles, zombies that walk sideways on their ankles give me the willies too)was falling directly onto my butt after a vault and bruising my tailbone. That little bugger still haunts me very occasionally. My teammate in springboard diving also did the typical "smack the head on the board" (she was shaken and bruised but fine).
Other than that, the most recent injuries have just been minor scrapes from falling down running outside. 🙂
I got the nastiest shin splint in my right foot too and I haven't really run in 5-6 weeks!!!
Only the first 2 weeks were difficult and I was constantly itching to go run, but even walking fast gave me terrible pain so I refrained. I was never a very enthusiastic runner to begin with and used the "I can't run" excuse to buy myself an indoor cycling bike. I LOVE BIKING NOW. Go figure. I tried a slow half walk/half run 1 mile romp on the treadmill and the ache came back a little. I'm beginning to think I'm just shin splint-prone in my right leg and there really isn't too much I can do… my left is FINE.
When I was in gymnastics I fell off the bars and broke my arm such that my forearm had a 90 degree bend it in and one of the bones was poking out. My coach saw it and screamed "Oh my god I'm calling 911!" and I asked her if I could still compete in the state meet. Which was the next weekend. Needless to say, I had to sit that one out.
I also blew out my knee while pole vaulting (ALC, MCL, LCL, meniscus + other assorted tendons) but because the trainer told me I just pulled a muscle, I walked around for a week and went to prom, heels and all, before learning the extent of the injury.
I've never seen a really bad injury (thankfully) although having practiced karate for a number of years I've seen my share of broken noses, ribs, and toes…and more than my share of cuts and bruises…
I am totally guilty of not resting an injury long enough, and of making the same mistake twice (or three or four times.)
Hopefully I'm starting to learn from my mistakes at this point ^_^
Nursing a strained bicep right now that is workout related. No remotely interesting story.
Also nursing a broken toe, not workout related. Dropped a cast iron skillet on while WHILE standing in a wooden chair. I am thinking that the floor would've given at least a little bit. The chair? Not so much! Yeah that one hurt!
When I was a kid, in the course of about 3 months I fell off my bike and tore all the skin off my shin, cut open my toe at the beach and got stitches, had intestinal flu, and fell off the monkeybars onto my head.
It was a cruel, cruel summer, lol!
When I was 18 I sprained my back in (ahem) voice class. No, I wasn't trying to hit a high note! We were stretching and I did plow, went too far, and heard and felt a pop. I went to the doctor and he said I'd thrown my back out. 3 years later a chiropractor told me I'd actually sprained it, and it hadn't quite healed properly.
I must say that, luckily, I haven't witnessed any horrible injuries like the one you describe. (I did see my brother get clocked in the head by a fly ball, and he couldn't tell us what day it was. But he didn't know what day it was BEFORE he got hit, lol!)
I haven't hurt myself directly at the gym. Well, after doing weighted side extentions I injured the cartilege on my ribcage.
While white water rafting, i fell eating lunch, spraining and badly cutting my ankle. then had to continue through the 2nd half of the rafting.
I fell biking and got 5 stitches.
I've sprained ankles 9 times and broken by baby toes 5.
That femur story is going to give me nightmares.
Great post!
Have to remind myself over and over again.
I am forever doing "Strong knees" and low back pain relief exercises either in response to it or in an effort to stave future attacks. An ankle sprain that I did not rehab taught me the lesson.
I feel while running outside and cut my knee so deeply you could see the bone. I needed 10 stitches and 5 days of IV antibiotics.
In the gym I've also fallen on the treadmill and gotten lodged on the belt while machine KEEPS GOING and takes skin off my legs.
I haven't posted much this week because the doctors are trying to take away my running shoes again and my climbing gear to boot. I'm not happy about it. I can't sit on the couch and feel fulfilled. Sigh
The Los Angeles personal injury attorneys are watching for this type of stuff now. Theses are actually being tried in court.
I have had multiple knee injuries, including slicing my knee to the bone on a sharp step in grade 6.
A bit like your story, my friends stood around and gawked.
I've been hit by cars three times (it's a wonder that i still leave the house).
After the increasing pain in my knees got a bit too much several years ago, I consulted a physiotherapist who mis-diagnosed osteoarthritis and recommended painkillers and glucosamine tablets daily to dull the pain while i waited to be old enough for knee replacement surgery.
Seeking a second opinion from a Sydney physiotherapist, I was relieved (in multiple ways) to be prescribed new orthotics and given some specific exercises to improve my walking style. That was 2 years ago and no more pain.
Correct diagnosis of an injury is crucial!