10 min read.

When you start to feel like your body’s falling apart, it’s hard to know if you’re doing the right thing to fix it.

 

After all, we have the Internet now… unlimited access to information of why things are right, or wrong, or right/wrong, or wrong sometimes but right others, and if it’s a right it might be wrong for you, or wrong sometimes but right one time… unless it’s wrong… right?

 

It’s frustratingly confusing!!

 

So, when you start putting some work in and your pain doesn’t change (or even gets worse), you can just feel like giving up. It’s not working, you’re wasting your time, and that was probably the wrong thing to do anyway, right?

 

I had a long journey from intense, daily chronic pain to now, and my biggest mistake was assuming that once I started working on my mobility it’d be a linear progression from bad to better, to great!

 

With no wobbles! No setbacks!

Why would I have setbacks when I was doing the right stuff?!

 

But ask anyone who’s been through a similar journey if they made straight & steady progress - the answer will be no. It makes sense, it’s just not a very nice thing to hear:

 

 

It’s like, ok… so I have to put in loads of work to feel ok, but it still might never go away?!

 

It’s important to know that setbacks are a part of the process of getting stronger or more flexible. If you’re trying to do things your body has never done before (or not for a very long time) it’s pretty much inevitable that you’ll push too hard, do too much, or end up in a triggering situation. When this happens, your body will force you to slow down, usually with pain, but it’s trying to protect you.

 

 

As you go through life, you fluctuate between various zones of pain, depending on what you’ve been doing

Ideally, you want to live your life in the green zone! You’ll bob up and down within your own tolerance levels: stub your toe, overstretch one day, get some pretty heavy DOMs after a workout, but overall, you’re pain-free and confident in your body!

Bumping up into the yellow zone is also fairly normal and expected – you couldn’t live your life without ever feeling niggles or aches! But in an ideal world, everything you’re doing to keep yourself moving & feeling well is enough to ensure you don’t stay there for too long.

 

Then you have the red zone, not a place any of us want to be! But unfortunately, if you’ve had a serious injury or live with chronic pain this can be where you spend a lot of time. 

 

The size of your zones is individual to you! Your body might be really robust and your green zone is massive! Takes a lot to put you into the yellow or red! Or you could be a little more sensitive, and fairly frequently cross over into niggle-dom.

 

You may have periods of your life where you’re right on the Green/Yellow border, any little thing seems to set off a couple of niggly days! But the main thing I want you to realise looking at this is that it’s all only temporary – time keeps passing and you keep bobbing up and down through your zones. Whether you go up or down depends on your actions & how you treat your body.

 

We’ll use these zones to demonstrate recovery & setbacks, starting with how we think recovery will go:

Whereas the reality is more like this:

 

Progress is never linear (in anything), and how we deal with setbacks is critical to our chance of recovery.

 

We can see how difficult it is to see clearly – each setback feels like a disaster, it feels like we’re back to square one and we have this “forever” mindset that makes us think we’ll always be in pain. In reality, each time can be less extreme & we get over it quicker and quicker. We gain more knowledge of what our body needs, work more on our weaknesses and extend the periods of time where we’re pain free!

 

The only way to make progress back into the Green Zone is to keep experimenting, trying things and to be consistent even during those frustrating times.

 

When I was recovering from my back injury I had 3 major setbacks, which made me feel like I was getting nowhere and going to be stuck with a weak back forever. However, I started to realise that if I kept doing all the moving, I’d been learning, I was able to overcome my pain flare ups faster and be able to function more throughout the day. Even if it reached extreme nerve pain that would take the legs from under me, I knew not to allow myself to freak out about it. I could move my way through it and stop the pain from happening!

 

All it takes is practice!

 

If you’ve experienced a lot of pain in the past, as you try to work on things your body’s defence mechanisms may kick in as an automatic reaction: don’t move!! You’ll hurt yourself!! The key is to stick with it until your body adapts to it, if you run away scared every time, you’ll be stuck in that pain loop for a very long time.

 

Here’s some actionable steps on what to do if you have a setback or flare up:

 

 

 

Your brain loves to make a catastrophe, if you allow it to get the best of you, you’ll have yourself dead and buried within the hour. You can immediately be filled with panicked thoughts, or the unhelpful “Here we go again…!”.

 

Stop, take a deep breath.

 

Take yourself out of yourself. Remember you maybe have just temporarily left your Green Zone. If someone else was freaking out, you’d calm them down and tell them not to be silly, so don’t allow yourself to get away with disaster talk! When your body’s being illogical, it is up to you to find the logic.

 

If you went on a drunken parkour rampage while wearing flip flops, slipped and fell onto a lamppost then maybe we need to get checked out at hospital to see if there is any damage.

 

If you just feel asleep with your arms folded on your sofa and woke yourself up 30 minutes later by your own flatulence… chances are you haven’t broken anything. It’s very likely that moving will make you feel better.

 

If things are feeling funky, then let’s not jump into today’s CrossFit workout! Be sensible, start doing slow joint circles and see how everything feels. Relax your breathing as you move and anything that feels uncomfortable or like your body is hesitant to do, gently hang out there and see can you get it to improve.

 

 

 

Did you do something new you haven’t done before?

Did you push a bit harder than normal?

 

Maybe it was just a bit much for you right now, so now you know that you’ll need to be more reserved next time rather than just pushing through, even though it felt ok at the time. Remember the Tolerance Zones from earlier? A sudden change could just push you out of the green.

 

Did you increase your number of mountain walks from 0 to 2 in one weekend?

 

Maybe your body just isn’t used to that volume of walking on weird surfaces! But now you know and you’ll most likely be ok the next time you try. Sometimes a setback can only happen once and never happen in the same way again, was just a reaction to something new.

 

 

It’s quite hard to be the 20-year-old personal trainer who sleeps 8 hours every night, takes their cold shower every morning, cuts negative people out of their life, gets 10k steps done before breakfast, journals barefoot with their infrared sauna light while sipping a warm cup of lack of responsibilities & peppermint tea… but that’s ok!

 

Life has this amazing ability to get in the way, and your day-to-day stress levels can not only make you feel overwhelmed & suck your energy, but stress can cause your body to act up - as if it is screaming at you to take a rest.

 

So, if you’ve had a change of habits recently, or moving house, or taken on new responsibilities at work, or have a load of worries on your shoulders, it’s not surprising that you’re finding old injuries rearing their ugly head again. Your stress has reduced your Green Zone, you’re already sitting closer to that border, so it doesn’t take much at all to send you back up into niggles or pain.

 

When I was going through my back pain, one of the hardest things for me to separate was how any time extra pressure was put on me, my lower back would join in. It always felt like “of course, now my back’s gone too! That’s the last thing I need!” but in fact, my emotional stress was just manifesting itself in a physical way – there wasn’t actually anything “worse” about my back during these times.

 

You can’t just ditch all of life’s hardships because your knees are sore, but there is some comfort in knowing that if you’re having a hard time, you may also feel things flare up too, not fun, but again, totally normal and it will pass, you’re never stuck that way forever.

 

If you find yourself going through a hard time, try to find something you can control. It might be your sleep, your diet, spending some time outside, it can be just enough to nudge you back into the Green.

 

 

 

To finish up I want to share some of the catastrophic thinking I’ve had in the past whenever I’ve had a flare up or setback, you may recognise similar thoughts in yourself or others and hopefully you can use these to start challenging them 💪🏻

 

My neck once twinged it so badly I couldn’t turn my head at all. One time it “went” while I was holding a very heavy weight above my head, I thought I had broken my neck…

 

I had not, and it’s totally fine now with some gentle Yes/Nos!

 

 

My shoulder once felt like it had come out of the socket and went back in a snagged something, I couldn’t lift my hand above shoulder height and thought I had torn this, that, and even the other….

 

I did not, it’s fine now after making sure I kept up rotation & full range of motion!

 

 

My knee twisted badly, it was swollen for a year, and I thought I had no cartilage left, that it was bone on bone and I would have a bad knee forever…

 

I had to get the tiniest bit of meniscus out of my knee with a keyhole surgery, it’s fine now. Especially when I keep up full range flexion!

 

 

My back went through serious chronic pain, and I believed my discs could slip, that I had a weak spine that was CRUMBLING before my very eyes and that I would never be able to walk upright AGAIN…

 

I have a couple of damaged discs, so do millions of other people and they’re fine now, and so am I with a little maintenance.

 

 

My right hip was extremely limited with rotation, as I improved it, I thought I had the worst case of bursitis, arthritis, hip implodeditis in the world and would need a hip replacement at 30….

 

I did not, it’s fine now…. I kept improving my hip rotation and realised that I’m a Silly Billy.

 

 

 

You’ve probably things you can improve on, but you are also probably fine too, don’t allow yourself to freak yourself out and start thinking you need to avoid everything or that nothing works for you.

 

Tailor your training to where you are currently at, learn how to work around minor aches and pains and keep moving forward no matter how slowly, as they say: you only fail if you quit!