LionelHutz’s BodyBlog

Last week on my leg day, I injured myself while doing squats on the Smith machine. During my first set of squats (after 2 sets of leg extensions for warm ups), I felt something funny in my lower back after the 3rd or 4th rep. Being a typical male with testosterone influencing my thinking, I brushed it off as maybe normal muscle tightness. So I continued to do more reps thinking it would loosen up. Big mistake. I felt something really wrong and stopped it right there. When I walked away…I knew I f#@ked something up. I could just feel something wasn’t right in my back. I couldn’t even walk properly. So I tried to strech and walk it off. No dice. I decided to go home. Of course it got progressively worse in a hurry. That night I couldn’t sleep because any little movement caused a great deal of pain. The next day, I was walking around like the Hunchback of Notre Dame…with alot less mobility. I went to get x-rays and have myself looked at by a doctor and a chiropractor. Fortunately, the x-rays revealed no major damage. The chiropractor said I threw my alignment off and re-adjusted my back. He said the muscles around the damged area were going to be sore and painful for a few days, but would get better with time and rest. Obviously I couldn’t do anything strenuous. Which meant no more working out for a while I had to miss time from work too- double bad news.

I was so upset at myself because I had a plan to accomplish such and such in a certain timeframe and this injury just threw a giant wrench into everything. Looking back and analyzing at the events of the injury, I concluded that I probably didn’t warm up properly and was likely also using bad form because the weight that I had on during the injury was alot less than what I normaly work with. So the moral of the story is ALWAYS WARM UP PROPERLY AND PRACTICE GOOD FORM. Setbacks are a part of life unfortunately. The important thing is to learn something from them and to not let them stop you from achieving your goals….in bodybuilding or in life.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 17th, 2007 at 8:35 pm and is filed under Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.