Category: learning and living
How to train while coming back from an injury
As you probably heard by now, in addition to being a personal trainer with a personal training studio located on Main Street in Boonton, I also double as a professional performing strongman and motivational speaker.
Basically I perform feats of strength as part of a live show like the sort of thing you’d see about a hundred or so years ago with performers like the Mighty Atom and Alexander Zass, but with a modern-day twist.
No I don’t dress like that during my shows.
Anyways, a while back I was booked to perform my feats of strength show coupled with a motivational speech for a high school. It was to be two shows approximately an hour each, done back to back.
Not a problem, I’ve done it before after all.
So during the first show, I get up on stage, do my feats of strength, and get to the part of my show where it is time to bend a pipe wrench. Now if you’ve been to my presentations before, you might know I have a history with wrenches. Most of the time I can bend them, sometimes I get close to blacking out on them.
In this case, I got injured.
I felt something in my hand pop followed with a bunch of pain when trying to do the pipe wrench. That happened during the first show and I still had to finish the show, and somehow get through the next one…which also included bending another pipe wrench.
It is in times like those, you just have to roll up your sleeves and just gut it out. That’s what I had to do as a professional.
And because I’m a professional, I also have to be very careful when training. If I show up to a gig in pain… I still have to gut it out. For the longevity of my performing strongman career, I try not to let that sort of thing happen if it can be avoided.
And in the event it does happen, I have to get it treated while still continuing to make progress without getting injured further.
So how do you train when coming back from an injury? This was a topic that was recommended to me in the Boonton unofficial facebook group.
First, you need to know what you are dealing with. In the case of musculoskeletal injuries, it would be good to have a good chiropractor or physical therapist to have a look at it and treat it if necessary. Then depending on what they say, they can determine what kinds of things are ok, and what kinds of exercises are off-limits for the time being.
In the case of what happened to me during the pipe wrench, it was something called my Thenar Eminence which has to do with closing my thumb.
And while you are training, avoid exercises that aggravate it. It may sound like common sense, but if it hurts, don’t do it.
There is a time and a place for pushing through pain. The time for that is when you are on stage in front of an audience of 500 that want to see you succeed, or during the fight or playing in the big game.
It is not in the training room.
No pain no gain looks great on a t-shirt, but it often fails in application and it sucks as a training program. That’s not how the pro’s train. Pro’s train methodically.
When people sign up for my one week free trial, the first thing I do is have them fill out a health history form. This lets me know what kinds of things they may have had in the past (surgeries, joint issues etc.).
Re-injury is one of the top causes of injury so I check them for that. Then from there, I put them through something called the Functional Movement Screen where I am looking at movement issues that may result in an injury if it’s not addressed.
The main thing I’m looking for is asymmetries (side to side differences in mobility, stability or strength), which can be another common cause of injuries. If I come across an asymmetry, corrective exercise becomes a priority so it doesn’t become an injury.
I’m also checking what high bang for the buck exercises we can and can’t safely do in relation to their goals. What we can, we focus on. What we can’t we either correct or if there is an injury already present I refer to someone more qualified to handle it.
And although we often focus on what we can’t and look for excuses to get out of training “because I have a bad back” which for the record, bad back is not a medical term, there is always something you can do, and do safely.
Focus on that, treat the injury.
Play to your strengths, fix the weak link in the chain overtime before it snaps.
If you need my help with this, I offer a one week trial membership of my personal training program. Simply text me at 973 476 5328 and introduce yourself to get started.
Oh and about that pipe wrench, I managed to bend it by doing something else. I found a way that didn’t make my injury worse. Stay strong everyone!
Eric Moss is a world-record-holding modern-day professional performing strongman, author, motivational speaker, and personal trainer. In the tradition of the strongmen more common during the turn of the century, he performs feats of strength such as bending steel and breaking chains as part of a show and speaks on goal achievement for corporations, nonprofits, government as well as for schools and universities. His exclusive personal training studio is located on Main Street in Boonton New Jersey, is close to Mountain Lakes, Denville, Montville and Parsippany New Jersey.
Eric Moss Rips a New Jersey License Plate – Feats of Strength Friday
You might be on my website for the first time in which case an introduction is in order. My name is Eric Moss, and I have a personal training studio located on Main Street in Boonton. In addition to being a personal trainer, I’m also a modern-day performing strongman and motivational speaker. What that means is I perform feats of strength as part of a live show like something you might have seen during vaudeville days but with a modern-day twist.
Since we are still recovering from a pandemic I started a youtube series called Feats of Strength Friday where I perform a feat of strength each week to add a bit of fun positivity and as a way of grabbing your attention so I can teach “physical culture” a common practice from back in the day.
“The physical culture movement in the United States during the 19th century owed its origins to several cultural trends……By the late 19th century reformers worried that sedentary white-collar workers were suffering from various “diseases of affluence” that were partially attributed to their increasingly sedentary lifestyles.
via wikipedia
If this whole ordeal has taught us anything, it’s that physical culture for strength and health is more important now than ever. For our own health, and the health of those around us we need to take charge.
“Americans tend to have more underlying conditions, like diabetes and obesity, that lead to more serious cases and even death from the coronavirus.”
“If you look at the United States of America with our epidemic of obesity as it were, with the number of people with hypertension, with the number of people with diabetes, if everyone got infected, the death toll would be enormous and totally unacceptable,”
Fauci
If you need my help with this, I have a 1 week free trial membership at my personal training studio in Boonton. Simply text me at 973 476 5328 and introduce yourself to get started.
Eric Moss is a world-record-holding modern-day professional performing strongman, author, motivational speaker, and personal trainer. In the tradition of the strongmen more common during the turn of the century, he performs feats of strength such as bending steel and breaking chains as part of a show and speaks on goal achievement for corporations, nonprofits, government as well as for schools and universities. His exclusive personal training studio is located on Main Street in Boonton New Jersey, is close to Mountain Lakes, Denville, Montville and Parsippany New Jersey.
Empathy and technical proficiency, useful attributes for a personal trainer
A while back I got a phone call. If it’s a local number I usually pick up since it could be a potential personal training client looking for help. Most of the time it’s just some Robo caller or a telemarketer out for my money.
In this case, it was someone looking for something greater than money. This person that called me was either an up and coming personal trainer looking to become one and was unsure how to be good at it and asked me a question.
She asked me “What do you think is the most important thing to being a successful personal trainer?”
Without even really thinking about it I blurted out “Well technical proficiency and knowing what you are doing is important, but the most important skill I would say is empathy and the ability to listen.”
Truth be told, if I had to sleep on it, I would have come up with the same answer. It’s been key to not only being technically proficient (I always sought out what I thought to be the best ways of doing things because I legit wanted to help my personal training clients).
The other thing is if you get down to the core of what I do, I take people from where they are, to where they want to be. And you don’t really know where they are until you assess them and see what it might be like to be them.
Before Neal came to me for personal training, he had been to 5 others before me. They either didn’t listen to him, or didn’t know how to progress him. He had said to me I was the only one that listened that seemed to know what I was doing.
Most of the time personal trainers come into it with the right intentions. They started working out themselves, got decent results, liked the results decided to help others get the same results. The thing is many times they just simply have good genes that respond quickly to exercise, and the ones that need help often have multiple things going on.
With another one of my clients before he came to me, he worked with a personal trainer for like a week before she pushed him too hard too soon and he couldn’t move the next day. Anticipating that he was initially hesitant to work with me.
It would be unreasonable to push people at a level they simply aren’t ready for. If I were to compare them to me, I have close to 20 years of working out. If I were to push someone like they were a world record holding professional performing strongman that would be unreasonable.
What is reasonable, is figuring out what challenges them. It might be easy for me but could be challenging for them. That’s how the game is played.
Start where you are, challenge yourself at a level you can handle without issue, build as you go. If you need my help starting I offer a 1 week free trial and have a handful of spots left. Text me at 973 476 5328 and introduce yourself to get started.
I truly hope that this pandemic ends soon and I can start training people in small groups again because I’m running out of space.
Eric Moss is a world-record-holding modern-day professional performing strongman, author, motivational speaker, and personal trainer. In the tradition of the strongmen more common during the turn of the century, he performs feats of strength such as bending steel and breaking chains as part of a show and speaks on goal achievement for corporations, nonprofits, government as well as for schools and universities. His exclusive personal training studio is located on Main Street in Boonton New Jersey, is close to Mountain Lakes, Denville, Montville and Parsippany New Jersey.