Day 26 of 365 — Why Recovery is Necessary & Often Longer Than Expected

Going through recovery is a tedious and occasionally long journey. More often than not, you find out your injury was not due to what you thought, but much more of an unforeseen reason. My last injury, tendonitis in my left wrist, was due to my shoulder immobility.

I developed this issue because my wrist would be bent to nearly a 90-degree angle during my squat, as seen below.

You may be thinking, why is this bad? Well, let’s think about it this way. If you were to punch someone with your first at a backward angle (similar to the position in this hand picture), given enough force, when you hit someone or something with it you will more than likely break your wrist or injure it if not. All of the force is issued to your hand at at first point of contact, what happens when your wrist isn’t directly behind it the point of contact? The force is transferred at an angle to the rest of your arm, putting a ton of stress on your wrist joint.

This same idea was applied to my wrist but at a lower intensity since the squat wouldn’t put as much direct stress suddenly on the wrist, however, over time it causes tendonitis as seen in my wrist. So what’s the solution? A ton of mobility work, I needed to strengthen my left shoulder as well as increase the flexibility, aka mobility.

This was a 3 step process. The first piece was to increase my flexibility so I could strengthen the muscles with the full range of motion (ROM). Next was to focus on strengthening the muscles and last was to do complex full body movements to bring it all together into one fluid movement. Since doing that I’ve seen a huge increase in my squat from being able to generate more drive from my shoulders and have it directly applied to the bar instead of losing some force from my rotated hand.