Injury & Rehab
Lifting with a long-term condition
Arthritis, hypertension, diabetes and a range of chronic conditions were once reasons to avoid resistance training. For most of them the evidence now points the other way.
Ruth Ostrowski
19 articles by Ostrowski
Injury & Rehab
Seeing a professional: who does what and what to expect
People delay seeking help partly because they do not know who to see, and partly because a previous experience involved being told to stop lifting.
Injury & Rehab
Wrist and elbow pain: the joints that complain about volume
Elbow and wrist problems in lifters are almost always load management issues, and they are among the most responsive to simple adjustments.
Recovery
When you cannot sleep well: shift work, small children and broken nights
Most sleep advice assumes you control your schedule. A great many people do not, and the useful guidance for them is different.
Injury & Rehab
Neck and upper back complaints in people who lift and sit
The story that sitting posture causes neck pain is intuitive, widely repeated and considerably weaker than most people assume. What does help is more encouraging.
Injury & Rehab
Hip pain in lifters: pinching, impingement and what helps
A pinch at the front of the hip in the bottom of a squat is common, frequently structural, and usually manageable by changing where you squat rather than how hard.
Recovery
Training past forty: what changes and what does not
Ageing changes recovery capacity and tissue tolerance more than it changes the ability to get stronger, which is better news than most people expect.
Injury & Rehab
Coming back after time off, without doing something stupid
The return after a layoff is where a surprising share of injuries happen, because strength returns faster than tissue tolerance does.
Injury & Rehab
Muscle strains: the timeline and how not to rush it
A pulled hamstring or a tweaked pec follows a fairly predictable course. Most of the bad outcomes come from returning to full load before the tissue is ready.
Recovery
Training when you are ill: the neck check and its limits
A common heuristic says to train if symptoms are above the neck and rest if below. It is a reasonable starting point and it misses several things worth knowing.
Injury & Rehab
Knee pain in the gym: what it usually is and what to do
Knee pain is common, rarely means damage, and is usually a load management problem dressed up as a structural one.
Recovery
Life stress and training: the load you are not counting
A programme that worked in a calm month can bury you in a difficult one, and the reason is that the body does not distinguish between sources of stress.
Injury & Rehab
Tendinopathy: the slow injury that responds to load
Tendon problems frustrate people because rest makes them feel better and then they return worse. The mechanism explains why, and it points to what actually works.
Recovery
Active recovery, and the recovery methods that actually earn their time
The recovery industry sells a lot of interventions with modest effects while the two things that dominate recovery cost nothing and are widely neglected.
Injury & Rehab
Shoulder pain and pressing: what usually helps
Shoulder pain in lifters is common and usually manageable. The reflex to stop pressing entirely is understandable and rarely the best plan.
Recovery
Stretching and mobility: what each actually does
Flexibility and mobility are not the same thing, static and dynamic stretching do different jobs, and most of what is claimed for both is not supported.
Injury & Rehab
Lower back pain in lifters: the reasonable response
Back pain is extremely common, usually not serious, and made considerably worse by the fear that it is. What helps is less dramatic than what most people are told.
Recovery
Delayed onset muscle soreness is not a measure of anything useful
Soreness is treated as evidence that a session worked. It is mostly evidence that a session was unfamiliar, which is a completely different thing.
Injury & Rehab
Training around pain without making it worse
The two common responses to pain — stop everything, or push through — are both usually wrong. There is a middle path and it is better supported than either.