injury

Exploring the Edges of Capacity

One potential framing of the situation is to think that my body is falling apart. Or to think that I’m prone to injury. It’s easy to blame age, or look for pathology, or wonder What’s wrong with me? But I really don’t like this way of looking at it. I don’t think it’s useful.

What’s going on? I’m having pain in new areas of my body. Each new experience feels relatively sudden and unprovoked.

But it’s not quite that simple. In truth, I’ve been trying new movements and asking more from tissues unaccustomed to providing. And I’m continuing to push in now-familiar movements, asking even more from tissues that, though accustomed, surely have a limit to their current capacity.

What’s another way of thinking about the situation that will do some good? I’m choosing to frame the experience as exploring the edges of my capacity.

The thing about edges is that it can be unclear where they are. Sometimes you have the idea they are lurking just ahead. Other times they catch you completely unaware. It often takes going past an edge to know where it is, and then, of course, you wish you could back up. But you learned by doing this. You learned where the edge was, what it took to cross it, and what you could do differently to perhaps stay away from the edge. You know your limits now.

This sounds like a way to avoid future injury and all that comes with it, like the pain, frustration, inconvenience, and emotional strain. The idea of staying far away from the edge is appealing. It’s an approach I could take without shame—because who wants to hurt themselves? But it also puts a limit on what I can achieve, and I’m not interested in limiting myself.

What if, by exploring the edges of capacity, we learn to see an edge as simply the thing that currently hinders our ability to make progress toward our goal? What if we treat it as something innocuous and likely temporary? It’s a nuisance, certainly, but not something that defines us. It’s not This is what forty-five looks like or I’ll never be able to do this. It’s just (another) challenge that requires patience and work.

And, at risk of rolling my eyes at this later, I might even call this exposure of weakness an opportunity.

Before encountering the edge, we don’t know where our limitations are. If you’re doing what you want to do and don’t encounter your limits, they may be irrelevant for you. After all, it’s only when they stop us from doing what we want to do that we consider them limiters. But if you’ve discovered a weakness and you haven’t reached your goal yet, you can work on it—to create more capacity, more space between your active self and the edge.

Am I injured? I think so, yes. But I get to choose how I think about it. I’m not falling apart, and I’m not particularly injury prone. What I am is an athlete who wants more from my body. I’m generally working within my capacity while also trying to increase it, and because I’m pushing against the edges on a regular basis I occasionally step too far.

It’s okay. I’m exploring the edges. I know where some of them are now.

SLOW PRACTICE

Handstand. I’m new to it—earnestly, painfully new—but I’ve had the handstand on my mind for a few years. Though I was building strength during that time, I wasn’t actively working on handstand skills or foundations. That changed a couple of months ago, and I can now say—with a self-congratulatory air—that “I’m working on my handstand.”

What changed so that I deliberately started training the handstand? The promise of the handstand for me, right now, is a goal-oriented challenge with an acceptable amount of risk. I’m recovering, slowly, from repeat back injuries, and my spine doesn’t like to be loaded or in too much flexion. These injuries take a long time to heal, and having had this experience I’ve decided to pursue fitness and physical skills in ways that are less likely to set me back for years at a time should I be injured in the course of practice. 

Certainly there are activities less likely than hand-balancing to contribute to injury, but I can mitigate the risk with slow practice. The handstand offers me the opportunity for disciplined training and the reward of consistent, incremental progress. It also allows me to focus on the foundational requirements without throwing my body into a position before it is ready. I can slowly expose my spine to more flexion, my wrists to more extension, my shoulders to more load in a deliberate, calculated way, and I can turn the dial down—go even slower—to reduce exposure if need be.

So far, I’ve had success with a weekly foundational practice. I’ve been working on wrist and shoulder mobility, holding a stacked body position, and getting comfortable with my weight on my hands and my hips above my head. All of which is doable with my healing back. I’m getting a taste of what it will feel like to be fully upside down and balancing, and I can see that the skill I really need to master is patience. Like healing from injury, learning the handstand will take time. 

I’ve been working through a training program at my own pace, which is significantly slower than scheduled. I’m ignoring the recommended weekly advancement in favour of listening to my body as I decide whether to try the next progression, hold a position for longer, or do more repetitions. I’m always excited to take the next step, but I’ve learned that it’s much more important to be ready for the next step, and that means tempering the excitement into a steady, sustainable interest that is more likely to allow for good decisions.

So I’m taking it slow, owning each progression, and grateful to have begun.

These Injurious Times

When the pandemic first made an impact here, in my life, in March 2020, the parallels between pandemic and injury experiences were quickly apparent. Everyday life changed and plans were put on hold. I had to adjust my expectations. I needed to assess risk often, under changing circumstances. I sought to know as much as possible to help me make good decisions. This has been my experience of life during COVID-19 for the last six months, and also my experience of injury.

Early in the pandemic and until very recently, the idea of writing about my injury felt inappropriate and self-absorbed. With so much going on in the world, affecting so many people so profoundly, my personal experience of injury seemed of little importance. It just didn’t feel right to write about it. But lately I’ve been thinking again about what it means to be resilient, this time during a pandemic, and I keep returning to lessons learned during injury. No matter what else is going on, I’m still in my body, still working through an injury, so I think it’s to be expected that my experience of injury will influence how I think about other things.

I’ve written before about working on physical resilience for its own sake as well as for bolstering mindset. Strengthening the body is useful (especially for an apocalypse, or a revolution), and taking action on this front gives the mind something positive to focus on. But mental resilience is surely about much more than giving the mind something to do, and if this pandemic has shown us anything about responding to adversity over an undetermined length of time, it may be that the mindset we carry with us is a significant factor in how we approach and experience hardship, the unknown, and change.

The Resilience Mindset

Resilience, as I’ve come to understand it, is largely about adaptation. To be resilient is to have the capacity to adapt to changing circumstances and thrive. Having a resilience mindset means being ready and willing to adapt as needed in new or challenging environments.

Human society chooses whether to adapt. Unlike other species with limited abilities to move, access food, fend off new predators, or shelter from heat and storm, humans get to decide if, when, and how we adapt (until it’s too late). Whether or not we humans, as a species, survive and thrive is largely up to us. We get to make the decisions that shape our fate.

Of course, we don’t instantly adapt just because we decide to do so. The work of adaptation can be difficult, unclear, and painful. Choosing to undertake this work requires courage and grit.

Applying a resilience mindset to injury or to pandemic times means figuring out how to adapt and doing the work to make it happen. It means setting new goals and adjusting expectations for daily life or long-term outcomes. It may require a new approach to something you learned how to do long ago, which itself requires flexibility and a willingness to try new things. It will likely require redefining what’s important to you, and your definition of success—in work, in relationships, in physical achievement, in life—will probably need to change. These are the adaptations you must choose to undertake in order to thrive, because the world/our body has changed and we cannot live in the past.

Choose to Adapt

The idea of “returning to normal” (that is still making the rounds this far into a worldwide pandemic) doesn’t sound like resilience to me. It sounds instead like determined ignorance: a refusal to acknowledge that the foundation or structure of our society/body has been cracked, deeply, by forces that require attention and redress. Normal is not—was never—an ideal state. Normal might be familiar, but it isn’t necessarily good for us.

Let’s not go back there. Let’s seek transformation and move forward instead.

There’s an idea in resilience planning, particularly in natural hazard and risk management, to “build back better.” This refers to recovery that offers a safer, more resilient place to inhabit following devastation. Though typically applied to buildings and infrastructure, the idea works just as well to conceptualize a just and fair society, or a strong spine. The intention, for whichever challenging situation we are seeking to recover from, is to create a new version that is better able to handle stressors, shocks, and forced change. To be resilient is to be able to withstand, recover, and continue on despite adversity, in whatever new form is optimal for the new condition we find ourselves living in. We do this by adapting.

Adaptation is resilience made manifest.

We each have an experience of injury that is valid and specific to us, and so it is with this pandemic: our experiences are not all the same. But most of us are finding that such challenges expose our weaknesses, and we must decide how to respond. Do we break or do we adapt? Do we settle for old ways of functioning or do we remodel ourselves to thrive?

I’m hoping both experiences lead us to a better future version of ourselves. I think they will, if we choose to adapt.

Curious and Sharp

I’m curious about how I’m going to handle this latest round of setback from injury. Curiosity is not my primary emotion, let me be very clear about that. But it’s the one I’m willing to talk about right now. 

I’m curious whether I’m going to feel more resilient or less when I come out the other side. I’m curious whether setbacks like this get easier to handle, the more often you experience them. I’m curious whether there are more lessons to learn from injury, ones I didn’t already pick up from my experiences so far.

Is curiosity an emotion? I’m not so sure that it is. But it seems like a fairly neutral state for my inner monologue to stew in. This situation is fresh enough that I don’t yet have perspective and haven’t learned anything new, so I haven’t yet embraced the silver linings. I’m in that cloud of feeling where just when I think I’m getting ahold of myself and calming down, someone asks how I’m doing…and I break down. This is how I know that I’m still in a reactive phase. This is how I know that I’m still in the feel-my-feelings stage of this latest incident. 

I don’t really understand what happened and I don’t know what the future holds, which makes curiosity a means through which I can poke and prod these two things without getting wrapped up in the fear. Not knowing is scary. Curiosity offers a small bit of distance and room for hope.

I’m curious if something I wrote a few days ago still feels as sharp today. Let’s look:

“I’m afraid. I’ve hurt my back again and all the remembered fear, frustration, pain, and panic is instantly here. I’m trying hard to not catastrophize the situation. Surely it’s not another disc herniation. But did I re-injure the tissue I’ve been working so hard to heal? Five months with no back pain and then this—I’m literally on the floor. What the fuck.”

…

It is less sharp by a hair. 

10 Things I’ve Learned About Injury and the Importance of Mindset

I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on injury and mindset. Maybe that’s what happens when you spend a long time injured, I don’t know. But while I’m certainly not an expert on the topic, I can tell you with some confidence that how you think about an injury, and yourself with that injury, affects your experience. Mindset matters.

Before we dive in, there’s another mindset piece at play in the reading of this piece, so let’s address that one first: Comparison isn’t helpful. It can be tempting to compare your injury to another person’s and dismiss their experience because they haven’t been injured for as long as you have, or it’s a different injury, obtained in a different way. Or, you may think that your experience matters less if others are more seriously injured than you, or injured more often, or if their injury seems to have a greater impact on their life. If you find yourself comparing, just stop. Stop it now. This is about you (well, actually, it’s about me), not other people. Each of us has an injury experience that is valid and specific.

Go ahead and relate to others, though. Empathize and share your experience. We can learn from each other. 

Okay, then. You’re injured. I’m sorry to hear that. I’ve been injured too, and I thought that by sharing some of what I’ve learned that it may help you.

1. Figure out if you are willing to address mindset

If you are reading this and feeling irritated with the idea of mindset—“Hey, this is a physical injury and what does how I think about it have to do with anything and it’s not like I can just ignore it and it’s really uncomfortable and I’m so frustrated and this is about my body not my mind!”—well, you may have already snorted in disgust and stopped reading.

Or you might recognize yourself in this, be tired of feeling powerless against the demands and limitations of physical injury, and want to tame the frustration.

I didn’t have a good handle on my mindset when I last got injured, despite already dealing with another long-term injury. As time went on and I wasn’t healing, I felt increasingly frustrated and sad, and I experienced some dark days. I was feeling very unlike myself. But it soon became clear to me that I needed—wanted—to do some work to reframe my experience and positively influence my daily mindset and overall outcome.

It’s okay to feel however you’re feeling about your injury. But know that you can choose to make the injury experience easier on yourself by working on your mindset. Are you willing?

2. Hold on to your power

Injury isn’t punishment; it’s not karma in action. You don’t deserve to be injured and you are not being tested.

Yes, sometimes injury is preventable, but sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it exposes a weakness; other times it is simply the effect of an overwhelming force. The injury itself doesn’t have an agenda—it’s neutral. But whether you saw it coming or you were blindsided doesn’t really matter. Your injury doesn’t reflect your worthiness.

Ascribing meaning—like the idea of punishment—to an injury gives your power away.

Why the injury happened is less important than what you are going to do about it now, and taking action requires that you believe in your ability to shape your future.

3. Look for support and participate in your recovery

Other people have a range of skills, perspectives, and good advice that they can share with you—if you let them.

I’ve started to think of this as gathering my team. I will recruit medical doctors, physiotherapists, osteopaths, massage therapists, chiropractors, naturopaths, and coaches, and I’ll keep those on the roster who prove their worth. There are practitioners in addition to these that may be useful to you. Gathering such a team is a privilege, to be sure.

I also recruit friends and family, because these are the folks I will call upon when I need to vent or need a boost or need to share a win. This is a privilege too, of a different kind.

The point, though, is that the team can’t do the work for you. You have to be a team player and contribute what your team needs to successfully provide support. In other words, your job on the team is to follow the protocol, do your rehab exercises, and share your feelings. Others can only help you if you faithfully participate.

4. Get your injury diagnosed

For me, this has been critical, twice over. Some would disagree about the importance of this, particularly if the treatment and recovery plan are the same regardless of the exact nature of the injury. I understand this thinking and I agree with it—generally, at least—in terms of moving forward to address the physical side of the injury, but it may not be what you need to address mindset.

Especially if the injury doesn’t appear to be improving.

Figuring out the nature of the injury allowed me a clearer picture of what I could expect in terms of recovery, which let me adjust my expectations, reset my goals, conserve the energy I was expending on never-ending internet searches, and, ultimately, accept where I was at.

5. Work on your resilience

I’m an optimizer: When something is important to me, I like to do everything I can to support that thing in the most effective and efficient way possible. So with an injury, I want to know what I can do (or not do) to heal faster and stronger. This includes doing work to prevent the injury from happening again.

Even if the injury didn’t directly result from a weakness, there is likely something you can do to strengthen the greater system that will benefit you the next time you are exposed to physical stress or trauma. Getting stronger—or more mobile, or flexible, or skilled—is something related to the injury that you can influence and make progress on. This increases your overall resilience, which may prevent future injury, or lessen its impact, or help you heal faster should it happen.

Doing the work to increase your resilience is about taking action, and taking action gives you something positive to focus your attention on.

6. Relax into the rehab and recovery process

For me, this was only possible once I knew what I was dealing with and had a plan. Prior to that, I couldn’t let go of the search for answers, and it was exhausting.

Knowledge and a plan allowed me to settle into the moment and find a training and recovery groove that left energy for other things. Once I did this, everything felt a little easier, more manageable, less catastrophic. I could trust the process, do the work, and mentally move on.

If you can relax into it without having to first chase down answers, please do. But whenever you manage it, you’ll feel less anxious and have more energy. And you’ll likely find joy in more things.

7. Let go of a timeline

The only thing I wanted more than to know whenI could expect to have healed from my injury was to actually have healed from my injury. The when was critical to my ability to plan for the future, and boy, do I like to plan. I’m also not very patient. So not knowing when I’d be done with my injury was excruciating, until I eventually let it go.

I’m not sure whether I’ve actually learned the skill of patience in a way that I can willingly apply it elsewhere, though I hope so. My experience has been, simply, that some injuries take a really long time to resolve, and there’s a point, after you’ve learned all you can and enacted everything you can think of to hustle healing along, where all that’s left to do is wait for the tissues to heal. 

Waiting is difficult at the best of times, when you know how long it will take. Waiting for something that will happen, at some point, eventually, is impossible to pace. The best thing to do is to stop waiting altogether. And that means letting go of a timeline.

So stop waiting and start working on other things (see #8).

8. Establish new goals unrelated to the injury

Chances are that you can work around your injury to train other parts of the body. See this as an opportunity to work on weaknesses or develop new skills and commit to their improvement.

Like I did, you may discover an affinity for a type of movement or training you didn’t know you could enjoy. It’s even possible that you may like the new focus so much that it takes precedence even after your injury resolves. But at worst, you’ll get stronger or more skilled at something, and that can only be useful.

As you work on your new goals, seeing progress over time, that long wait (see #7) for your injury to heal may diminish a bit in its hold over you, and reaching new training goals even while injured takes much of the sting away.

It’s possible, of course, that your injury is such that physical training of nearly any kind isn’t recommended right now. If that’s the case, respect it, and look for non-physical goals you can pursue.

9. Embrace (or discover) your whole identity

You are not your injury, or your activity.

It can be easy to lose perspective and think of yourself as “someone with hip pain,” for example, as if that could describe the whole you. (It can’t.) You are also not your activity; even while you were running/cycling/climbing/weightlifting, this was never the totality of your identity. You are a whole, complex person, injured or not, doing your chosen activity or not.

A relatively minor injury may sideline you for a while, but don’t let it question who you are; you can be a runner who isn’t running right now. Conversely, a relatively major injury may require that you stop running altogether. This isn’t easy to deal with, and you may feel lost without it, but I can tell you from experience that there will be something else you can get passionate about. You will find it if you look. But this new thing will not become the entirety of your identity either, because you are never only one thing.

So who are you? Who do you want to be? And how do you want to spend your time? If your injury results in you having a little more space to reflect on this, it’s only a good thing.

10. Decide how you want to think about the experience

Injury can have a meaningful effect on your life. It doesn’t have to, but it can, and the effect can be positive or negative. Do you want the sum total of the experience to be negative? Or would you rather look for the positives, the things that enrich your life, the silver linings?

This doesn’t mean that the injury itself has meaning and power (see #2). Rather, you have the power to frame the experience into something that ultimately helps you achieve your goals. It’s a choice. The earlier you can decide how you want to benefit from your experience of injury, the sooner you can focus on those gains and enjoy their benefits. I’m choosing to value the gains made from my experience with injury—in mindset, strength, patience, and new skills—over anything I may have lost.

. . .

Now, am I always successful with my own mindset work? Do I do all of these things, perfectly, all of the time? Hell, no. But I don’t think that’s the point.

This is not a quest for perfection and there’s no need to beat yourself up for taking some time to wallow or for just not feeling like doing your rehab exercises this morning. All things take practice, and mindset is no exception. The more you work on it, the better you’ll get.

The big lesson is understanding the enormous importance of mindset in the experience of injury and that we have the power to influence our own stories. I know what I want my story to be. Do you?

First published as a multi-part series from August 30 to October 2, 2019, Instagram (@shanajstone) and Facebook.