How Do Injuries Occur?
Often, when evaluating someone in pain with no specific mechanism of injury, like twisting an ankle or lifting something too heavy, they’ll ask me “what do you think caused this?”.
For me to tell them exactly what caused their pain would be speculation, but most injuries can be narrowed down to two factors:
LOAD and CAPACITY
Load is used to refer to an external force acting on your body. This can be an actual load like a dumbbell or barbell, your body weight, momentum, and reaction forces from the ground or another person/ object. Capacity is a term used to describe a specific tissue’s ability to absorb and transmit/ disperse such load.
To simply explain what happens during an injury: load is exceeding capacity.
An example would be trying to lift a 10-pound weight with a single piece of paper. The paper is not built to withstand such forces from the weight and will rip before the weight leaves the ground. The ripping of the paper is analogous to tissue damage, whether that be to a muscle, tendon, ligament, or bone (although the term “ripping” does not directly translate to what is actually happening to your tissues).
Injury occurs here, load > capacity:
If you want to be able to lift the weight off the ground with paper, you have two options:
Decrease the weight (load)
Increase the number of papers (capacity)
When dealing with a minor pain, a short-term fix to allow for continued participation in exercise or sport is to decrease load. This could be anything from reducing weight or volume during workouts in the gym, cutting back on distance or frequency of running, or reducing participation in sports to limited practice/ game time (aka load management).
Decreased load with same capacity:
To improve pain in the long-term, your best bet is to increase capacity so that you may also progressively increase load with gradual increase in training intensity, without resulting injury. This is often accomplished with exercise.
Increased capacity, allowing for increased load without injury:
However, your capacity for loading can fluctuate as a result of many factors such as sleep, mood, nutrition, and stress. Increased stress and poor sleep have been correlated with elevated pain and poorer performance in sports, while quality sleep and replenishing energy stores is well known to be vital for recovery after exercise. Therefore, exercise is not, and should not, be the only way we improve our capacity as this would only be addressing a piece of the puzzle. Habit changes such as tracking macro-nutrients and calories, improving sleep hygiene, reading, journaling, and meditating are all ways we can reduce pain and improve capacity for load outside of exercising.
If you find yourself constantly dealing with pain or battling injuries and haven’t had luck with addressing this on your own, we are here to help!
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