Injury Optimization

A not-so-revolutionary manifesto

Peaks and Troughs

I am currently engaged in a powerlifting competition with my cousin. The rules are laddishly simple: get as strong as possible as fast as possible. The winner will have the highest sum total between the three major lifts: squat, deadlift, and bench after twelve months of training.

We are about six months into the challenge, and I have been injured twice; nothing serious, fortunately, but I tweaked my shoulder and my back on separate occasions.

Both injuries were the result of a mindset that the structure of secondary and, especially, postsecondary education perniciously sneaks into our habits. Like children, we spend our years of formal education cupping water in our hands at the kitchen sink and sprinting down the hall to throw it at our siblings before too much worms out between our fingers.

Consider what such discrete bouts of exertion look like. The chart is a series of peaks and troughs (valleys) where periods of extreme exertion are buttressed by symmetrical troughs of inaction.

Accomplishments in this framework are flat, at level with the peaks and dissipating through time. GPA is the average, not cumulative value of a series of peaks.

Real Progress

We all know that education is not like life. Where education is discrete, life is continuous, and so are its real objectives. The peaks and troughs are a contrivance used to (rather unfaithfully) represent reality.

In the real world, progress is more like an S-Curve.

Accomplishments accumulate slowly on shaky footing, accelerate sharply once the foundation is settled, and then graduate into a gentle slope of diminishing returns (cue grit, grind, and persistence). We are used to seeing this S-Curve used to visualize progress, but it is not often juxtaposed to the chart of peaks and troughs.

This should change. While our minds may appreciate chart two, our habits correspond to chart one. That means intuitions suitable to a discrete goals environment are applied in the wrong domain. Injury results and the curve is broken.

I experienced this early in my first job out of school. Overeager, I sprinted, spending long hours at the office learning the codebase and chewing through project after project. Burn out and discouragement were the inevitable result (especially as progress in that environment is not even an S-Curve, but rather a fixed series of plateaus).

Bad habits have been lurking ever since. They have shown up in my first attempts to learn a foreign language, to run a 35 minute 10k (hello achilles injury), and to manage a business. While in time I have learned the S-Curve, the temptation to over-exert is always there, and new challenges seem to be triggers¹.

Optimize Around Injury

Back to powerlifting. Despite encountering the lesson ad nauseam, my instinct in the gym is still to do too much, too fast, and with too little recovery.

This has led me to search for a heuristic. Reflecting on my failures (injuries), I realized three things:

1. There are two sorts of injuries: minor and major. Minor injuries might keep you out of the gym for a spell, but are nothing serious. Major injuries are ones that force long periods of inactivity; these are the notorious curve-breakers.
2. Injuries come because there is no natural downslope on an S-Curve. We get away with unsustainable efforts in the world of peaks and troughs because of the artificial symmetry between effort and respite.
3. The S-Curve is smoothed, and so unrealistic. It assumes perfection in program design while uncertainty will necessarily force the opposite. We will make mistakes, and progress will suffer setbacks.

Taken together, these considerations are the basis of a perhaps not-so-revolutionary manifesto: effort must be sustainable. To reach goals, one must stay on the curve, and it is clear that a poorly trained intuition does not service this end.

What does this mean in practice? Let’s look at the principles of an injury-optimized weightlifting program.

Moving forward, I am focused on the blocks between my workouts and not the workouts themselves. My warm-up, nutrition, and recovery receive the greater attention— a pivot from a leaning towards workout and arbitrary weight benchmarks².

This addresses the risk of curve-breaking injury. Next to consider are the minor ones, which are of very different character. Unlike major injury, minor injuries are to be expected, not avoided. I have shifted to viewing them as important signals for improvement.

When I tweaked my shoulder, it was because I was doing too much bench press. Instead of just pushing through it or worrying about lost “gains,” the correct reaction was to accept a natural recovery opportunity while re-adjusting — less bench, more dumbbell , and mixing in shoulder stabilization exercises. Here the injury signaled both the creep of bad inuition and flaw in program design.

Ray Dalio provides a handy visualization for what incorporating minor injuries into the program looks like:

Getting Out of Your Own Way

On one level, wisdom is nothing more profound than an ability to follow one’s own advice -Sam Harris

The recognition of minor-injury-induced setbacks and major-injury-risk calls for not only checking the habits of the Peaks and Troughs model, but also for setting expectations with an adjusted S-Curve. Injuries are a feature, not a bug of improvement.

Most of us know this already, but application is always trickier than understanding. A focus on injury is one heuristic that can be used to bridge the gap.

I have adjusted to view a time in a valley as exciting, not frustrating — the next burst of progress is at hand. It is a pyschological fix more than anything.

I’m not sure if I’ll end up hitting my powerlifting targets (they were set in a peaks and troughs fever, after all). Still, if I make it to the finish line with a healthy relationship to injury and a dormant set of bad habits, I’ll have become stronger in a much more useful way.

Footnotes

[1] Interesting context for the persistence of bad habits is found in neuroscience; no matter how many good habits we layer in, bad habits (and analogously, intuitions) seem to stick around.

[2] As another practical application, I have come to view regular yoga classes as just as important as time in the gym.