CS: So what are the most common types of injuries that affect bodybuilders?
LL: The most common types, in no particular order are:
- Tendonitis: I mentioned this before which is inflammation of the tendon.
- Straining: I mentioned this as well, and to me this is tearing a good percentage of muscle fibers. This comes from overstretching or overusing a muscle, and it's very common.
- Spraining is very similar – it's overstretching the ligaments, and most people expereience this in the form of sprained ankles and similar injuries. You can get sprains even when you're working out, so you have to be careful with that.
- Bursitis: This is inflammation of the bursa sack, which is the padding between the muscle and the bone. This tends to happen most often in shoulders, for example.
- Avulsions: These are a tearing of the muscle, like a pec tear or something.
- Contusions: These are injuries resulting from bruising caused by impact. These kinds of injuries are quite serious. I had an injury once as a younger bodybuilder when I was in my teens, and I actually dropped a bar that I was bench pressing onto my chest. I felt like I had been hit by a Mack truck! I ended up with a bruised sternum. So contusions are possible, and they're obviously more freak-type of accidents but you have to be careful to not drop a weight on yourself. These kinds of injuries can be potentially life threatening. Imagine if you're doing behind-the-neck presses with a bar and you drop the bar on the back of your neck, it can be lights out.
- Fractures: These don't happen so much, but I've seen them, especially in powerlifters.
CS: Let's talk about treatment, so that you can get back into the gym without much of a layoff.
LL: Ok. First, back off. In other words, if you have a legitimate injury, you either need to take time away from the gym to allow your body to recover, or you need to work around the injury. I used to do this – work around the injury. If I had something going on in a leg muscle, for example, I could still go to the gym and work my upper body, or I would choose exercises that wouldn't directly antagonize the muscle group. There have been times, for example, where I've had sore elbows, which would prevent me from doing bench presses, but would not prevent me from doing pec deck or flyes with dumbbells.
Secondly, I would say go and see a doctor, or a chiropractic doctor is a good place to start, and let them determine if the injury is serious – what the extent of it is – they can spot potentially damaged bones and the like, so I think that's important.
If it's a minor injury, by contrast, and this is what I always used to do, first I would back off, but I would rest it and ice the area. I like to ice the area for about 10 to 15 minutes until the area goes numb, and then take the ice pack off and let it come back to body temperature slowly, and then I would repeat the process. What this does is create a “thermal pump” between hot and cold. The cold pushes blood and debris out of the area and the warming up allows warm and fresh blood to come into the area as temperature normalizes. You can do this several times a day.
