A Tipping Point: The Framework That Might be Contributing to Your Recent Injury

So if you are currently injured, or if you’ve ever been injured, I want to give you a framework to think about that injury. This is a framework that we use often when working with individuals coming in to manage loads. We want to get to the crux of where we might be able to make changes and adjust those loads to keep them active. But to also give us direction into what may have helped contribute to some of the issues that at play.

So here is our load scale. We all have a certain amount of load capacity. How much can our body handle? How much load can we put on our body and still maintain this homeostasis? That is all comparative to how much load we are actually putting on our body. So this is our capacity to tolerate that load. This is the actual amount of load that we’re putting on. So we may have strength to control a certain amount. And over here, we’re putting on more or less or equal to that amount. And there’s a scale at play. We’re either going to be balanced, loading too much, or under loading and having more capacity than we can tolerate.

There’s also other factors that contribute to this biomechanical load. Those can be things like sleep, hydration, our nutrition, our stress, our connection with others etc. There are a lot of other variables at play from an outside perspective, working in and changing effects within our body.

These other variables are supposed to be happening at baseline. We’re supposed to have good sleep. Our bodies are designed to be hydrated, to have good nutrition, to manage stress, to connect with other people. Most of us don’t fulfill in all these promises to the body. We’re limited in our sleep. We’re limited in our hydration and our nutrition, etc. If we are limited in any of these things, it actually adds more load to the body.

So let’s use an example. So let’s say our capacity is to tolerate 20 lbs. For the sake of this example, I’ll use pounds but it can be 20, whatever. 20 miles a week, 20 pounds of force, 20,000 steps. It can be whatever you want it to be. But we’re just gonna use 20 pounds. And how much load we’re putting on our body is 20.

So we’ve hit this balance right? Perfect. We feel like we’re in the exact right spot. This is somebody walking in saying, “Hey, I haven’t changed anything about how much I’m doing day-by day, but I’m getting an injury. I’m getting hurt, I’m having discomfort. What’s going on?” We have to look down here. Did something change with your sleep with your hydration, with your nutrition, stress, connection, work stress, family stress, travel stress, upcoming holidays? Has something changed there?

And if it has, this is actually additive. So instead of you putting your 20 pounds of normal activity on, if you’re limited here, it actually might feel like 30 pounds. That might be 30 pounds worth of stress and load on your body, which is tipping the scale.

So it might not be what you’re doing from a biomechanical standpoint, it can be something that you’re doing outside of that. Things that you’re not helping to nourish the body or help recover from the loads that you are putting on it.

What can we do in this situation? Well, this scale is tipped. We need to decrease the biochemical load, to level out the platform within the hopes of increasing our load capacity.

We focus on decreasing this load. Right now that 20 lbs is too much. Even though it’s what you’ve been doing for a long time, and it matches what’s over here. We might need to decrease that. We might decrease it to 10 lbs or something.

The other things we need to do is we need to work on all the other variables. We need to give a little bit more focus to sleep. Can we get 30 minutes extra at night? Can we try to get in more hydration? We focus on our nutrition? What can you do to manage stress?

The hard part is, a lot of times people use this movement to manage stress, and we’re trying to back off the load of that movement. So we gotta find a different strategy. Reading a book, connecting with friends, seeing family, sometimes causes stress, sometimes can help with stress.

So how can we manage this so that we can change this number as well? And that hopefully, in the short term, this can be 20 pounds or maybe a little less, to help this capacity come up a little bit. To help that scale tip in this favor, so that once we can calm things down initially, then we can layer on more and more load to gradually bump up this load capacity. Then instead of 20, I’m just going to double it. We get to 40.  You can take that much more biomechanical load to tip the scale.

Hopefully that helps you reflect and think about if you’re struggling with some injury. Or something’s bothering you, little aches and pains here and there. It may be load capacity. Maybe it’s not that you’re weak, maybe it’s not that you have limited low capacity. Maybe it’s that right now there’s increased biomechanical load because of some other variables at play.