The "Gift" of Injury

Welcome to the platform podcast where we talk to coaches, athletes, experts, and real people to learn about their approaches to training, nutrition, mindset, and much more. I am your host, Jordan Kunde-Wright, founder and head coach of the Twin Cities Kettlebell Club. And I'm on a mission to help others build sustainable, healthy lifestyles. Before we jump into the episode, I want to remind you that registration is live for the second annual Twin Cities Kettlebell Open on October 22. Hosted by our friends at the athlete lab in Little Canada, Minnesota. And just like we did last year, we will include a video submission option for participants who are unable to make the trip in person. And they'll be eligible for all of the same prizes as our in-person competitors. Just go to our website, Twin Cities Kettlebell Club dot com for details. Now this week, I'm going to give you fair warning. I kind of went on a rant here. I'm a little bit upset about the gift of injury. It's a turn of phrase that you have a whole bunch of people say, you know, injuries, a gift, COVID, a gift, you know, et cetera. And I understand the intention of cognitive reframing and turning things into a positive that are negative, but let's not lie about the fact that they're negative. And so in this episode, I talk a little bit about why I have a different perspective on the whole thing of the gift of injury. And as well as how I try and manage injury risk with my athletes and some of the things that you can do in your own life. So I hope you find the episode useful. And as always, I want to thank you for taking the time to listen to this podcast. And if you find it useful, please leave us a five star rating interview on Apple podcasts or your app of choice. Share the episode with a friend tag us on social media or even just send me a message on social media or email letting me know that you find it valuable. It means a lot to me. It keeps me wanting to make this content. And I truly, truly appreciate that you are here. So thank you so much. The best way you can support me is to register for the Twin Cities kettlebell open and meet me in person and maybe tell a friend or two. Of course, you can always support our affiliates and sponsors whose links you'll find in the episode notes. And if you're interested in coaching, you're looking for a coach or you think you need support, please fill out the coaching interest form that is also linked in the episode notes. So thank you for listening. And without further ado, let's step on to the platform and talk about the gift of injury. All right, welcome into this episode of the platform podcast. I am your host Jordan Kunde-Wright, founder and head coach of the Twin Cities kettlebell club. I am very excited to be recording today. It is an awesome day for me. I have finally been able to start lifting kettlebells again. Oh god, did it feel good? In case you didn't know, which I don't assume that everybody knows what the hell is going on in my life. I had to have soldier surgery, shoulder surgery, excuse me. And seven weeks ago, I had a had an injury from a fall and needed to get my right labrum and biceps tendon repaired and had that happen. June 1st, actually, as it were, which made it easy to remember and had to get that fixed. So I finally was able to get that fixed six months after the injury happened. And now I'm seven weeks into the rehab process and had a nice consult with my PT Michael and he gave me clearance to lift five pounds with my right arm. I actually specifically grabbed a kettlebell to show him like, hey, here are the moves that I want to do with my non dominant hand. So I want to be able to do snatch. I want to be able to do jerk. I want to be able to do long cycle on this other side. And, you know, he was like, yeah, that's that's fine. That's that's under five pounds in your right hand. Kind of like I was an idiot for even asking, but I wanted to make sure he could see. What the mechanics are, when you swing your free arm on a snatch and long cycle in particular, you know, you're pumping your pumping that free arm to help gain momentum. So I wanted to make sure that I was going to be okay to do that over and over again. And fortunately, he said that was fine. And so today I had my first time doing a snatch set. My friend Sarah joined me, sorry, I had the doctor Sarah. Wait, that doesn't narrow it down. There are two doctor Sarah's. So this is Dr Sarah from Canada, who has been on the podcast with me and she jumped on a zoom with me and we trained together. And it was it was fantastic. I was so excited to get back on the platform that I actually like got goose bumps before I picked up the bell for the first time. It was it was awesome. It really it really was awesome. And I told her I told her during the during the zoom what the topic of the podcast is going to be this week because it is one of these things that I have a slightly different perspective on then most people. So the topic of the podcast is the gift of injury. And so obviously having gone through an injury recently, I have, I have a perspective on this. So I will warn you guys right now that there is going to be explicit language in this episode because my perspective on this is probably different than most people you will hear people talk about the gift of injury. And if you have small children listening, please. Your method or you know turn off the podcast. Fuck that shit. Fuck that message of injury is a gift that makes no logical sense to me. Yeah. Why, why is that the case? Well, injuries hurt for one, if you've ever been significantly injured, they hurt pretty bad. I don't know about you, but in general, I try and avoid major pain. I like to expose myself to small doses of pain on a semi regular basis so that I can expand my tolerance for pain and be able to handle hardship, but actively introducing yourself to injury would be foolish. So this whole idea of the gift of injury to me is kind of bullshit. There are more reasons that I'll go into here. Injury diminishes your ability to express your athleticism. Now, that's obviously true in the short term because when you're hurt, you can't train and you also can't compete. This is why the number one rule for the Twin Cities kettlebell club is live to train tomorrow, i.e. don't get injured. That's our top rule. That is the number one guiding principle that I give to my athletes don't hurt yourself in practice. For a lot of people, this is actually a kind of mind blowing. That I that I give people permission to not push themselves to their breaking point is a pretty simple reason for that because when you're hurt, you can't train, right, you can't practice, you can't get better, right, so if you guys are familiar with most people are probably not familiar. So I'm going to I'm going to go a little on a little bit of a diversion here. So St. John's University here is in is in Minnesota. And they are a division three school here in the in Minnesota that has been a very successful football program. And they're they're the St. John's Johnny's and they have a they they've won four national championships in their in their history. And 34 conference titles I had to Google it to get the to get the official to get the official number on it. One of the crazy things that that people don't know is that John Galardi or gagliardi, excuse me, John gagliardi, who is a hall of fame coach, he has a career record of 400, 489 wins, 138 losses and 11 ties. The most wins of any coach in college football history across all divisions, right, so an incredibly successful coach, Hall of Famer, tons of accolades to his name obviously passed away in in 2018 died a legend. His philosophy is they don't hit in practice. They don't tackle in practice. They don't do any live contact in practice. Why? Because in his first or second season, I can't remember it's probably legend at this point, but early in his coaching career when he had what he thought was a pretty competitive and good team. He lost his best player to a blown out knee from a practice injury when they were tackling. I think it was his running back or his quarterback, I can't remember. Blue out his knee in practice, not in a game, they hadn't even played a game at this point. Blue out his knee in practice practice. We talk about practice. Blue out his knee in practice. So like a intelligent person, he assessed and did a retrospective on what went wrong in this season. He looked back on it and said, well, we lost our best player in practice to a contact injury that could have been avoided. And so he decided to test a hypothesis of what if we didn't tackle in practice, what if we don't hit in practice and instead focus our effort on improving our technique. And learning the right strategies to employ, making sure that everyone knows the playbook, making sure that our team everyone on the team understands what position they need to be in on every play and what their role is within that play and understands their responsibilities, they can execute their assignment. Well, obviously, the proof is in the pudding, as they say, he went on to an incredibly successful career and his players, many of whom I've talked to because they're here in Minnesota, I didn't play at St. John's, I wish I would have, honestly, but not, I actually shouldn't say that I love Luther college. I met my wife at Luther college, I love coach after you who I played for, but I say that because I accumulated many, many injuries in college, some of which happened in practice, oddly enough. So he had a very successful career by not getting people hurt in practice and when you talk to his players, say, man, it was great because on Saturday, when we lined up against people, they were tired or beat up or injured and we were just raring to go, we could not wait to hit someone. So that Saturday was when we got all our hitting in, we couldn't wait to play people because they were healthy, they were healthy and rested, he decreased the stress that his players faced throughout the course of the season by removing a major source of stress in their life, which was tackling in practice, hitting in practice, live repetitions in practice. So the entire intent behind that was to reduce their injury risk profile. So injuries led to decreased results, decreased ability to express their athleticism in their chosen time of competition. So injury is bad. I know that seems very obvious, right, and know that seems like an obvious point to make, but it's shocking to me how many people, but particularly people who are responsible for leading others, coaches are pushing them to the fringe of their capability. Consistently, right, and I know that you have to touch the fringes of your capability in order to expand your capability, but you can do so in an intelligent way. You can do so in a way that allows you to stay safe and keeps you within the bounds of moderate and acceptable injury risk is what I will say, right, because injuries decrease your ability to express your athletic potential. If you're hurt, you can't get better. When you're hurt, your entire focus is on getting healthy again. So don't comment me telling me that injury is a gift. Go fuck yourself and your injury is a gift. Injury is not a gift. Injury is damaging. And every time you get injured, especially significantly, you come back as less of an athlete. Right, even my surgeon said when I injured my shoulder and had to have surgical repair, he said, well, after about six months, if everything goes well in your rehab, we should be able to get you back to about 95% of your previous capability. So there you go, a 5% reduction in my ability. That's with one single injury. Now, if you have multiple injuries, like I have had over the course of my athletic career, then you diminish your athletic ability every time you have an injury. And guess what, it's nonlinear. If you have a 5% reduction in performance because of a right shoulder injury and 5% reduction in your ability because of a left shoulder injury. And you have a 10% reduction because of a lower back injury and another 5% reduction because of a hamstring injury, right. That doesn't equal a 25% reduction in your athletic capability, right, 5 plus 5 plus 10 plus 5 should be 25. Lots of maths there. That would be a 25% reduction in athletic output if it's a linear equation, but it's not. It's compounding. So you can quickly become a shell of the athlete you used to be if you have many significant injuries over the course of your career. As I have had, right, I didn't understand this principle when I was younger. I bought into the philosophy of pain, don't hurt. You play hurt because your team needs you. You know, don't be a pus. Don't be a Sally, suck it up far from the heart, etc, etc. Pain is a function of the brain and therefore can be shut off or ignored. Like these are all things that I internalized over the course of my athletic career. And to my own detriment at this point in my life, you know, I'm 39 years old and I have, I have some injuries that will never get better. I have some things that I will always deal with because there are things that you just don't bounce back from. And some of them, a lot of them, especially the worst of them come from playing hurt. They come from pushing through injury or not knowing when to take it down a notch and really take care of myself and being okay with not being in the game. Now part of that's my own personality. I will admit that I will take that on. I have to wear that because as you can tell, I am a passionate person and I wanted to be on the field. I wanted to play. I took pride in being able to play hurt. I took pride in not missing games. Even I didn't even let my teammates know what I was dealing with a lot of times. A lot of my teammates have no idea how many injuries I played through. I played with a broken rib. I played with an elbow that I hyper extended many times. I played with a shoulder that dislocated over 20 times or sub-luxed over 20 times. I played, I played with it out of socket for a play. Because the trainers didn't know that I had a, my shoulder was out of joint and they told me to go back in, you know, the coaches told me to go back in, you know, because they didn't have a backup ready to come in and, and we, we just scored a touchdown. So I played the two point conversion with my shoulder out of socket. I still got my block, by the way, yeah. Yes, I'm still proud of that, which shows my psychology a little bit. Even as I'm ranting about how injuries are bad in playing hurt is not a good decision. So my point is that playing hurt pushing yourself to the point where you are hurt is not a good thing. An injury is not a gift. Right. It diminishes your ability to express your athleticism. If injury was a gift, then wouldn't we want to get hurt more frequently? I mean, that just seems like a logical thing. If injury is such a gift, don't you want gifts? Don't you want you want to be bestowed gifts? So if injury is a gift, then you should want to get hurt. Right. You should want to put yourself in that position. You should want to push yourself to the point where you get hurt. Right. But that's not true. And that's, that's absurd. When we, when I say it out loud, right, like, of course, that's, of course, that's ridiculous. We all know that's ridiculous. It's ridiculous on its face. So injury being a gift is not true. Calling all kettlebell drinker, you honorable warriors and wielders of the steel. The time has come to raid. Join us and fight for honor, glory, and the spoils of battle. Sign up today for the Twin Cities kettlebell open on October 22nd, in person in little Canada, Minnesota, or by video submission from anywhere in the world. Come fight for your clan, or for glory, all your own to be told in your saga, claim your spoils, and may your name ring out forever in the hall of champions. Sign up today at Twin Cities kettlebell club dot com. Instead, we spend significant effort trying to prevent injury. That's why we warm up. It's why we focus on mobility. It's why we do flexibility training. It's why we, hopefully, only stretch the boundaries of our capability and don't spike our volume in crazy numbers. You don't, you don't suddenly go from working with a 20 kilo bell jump up to working with the 32 kilo bells. Maybe you do that on one set, but you don't do that for your entire session. And if you do what likely happens, you probably get hurt. And then you don't progress. You digress weird. Right. So if injury was such a gift, we wouldn't actively try and prevent it yet we do. We invest significant time, energy, effort into being more resilient. There's a whole movement of being anti fragile. Being anti fragile is just a branded way of saying being resilient. Resiliency is the resistance to injury or the resistance to stress. The ability to handle stress without breaking is resilience. Right. That's physical, mental, spiritual, emotional, et cetera. So building resiliency is something that we focus on. So if you're focusing on resiliency and being anti fragile, you can't then tell me that injury is a gift. Sorry, not true. Fuck off. I've had too many injuries in my life to accept that premise any longer. And I hope that you're not offended by my passion and anger here. It's not directed at anybody that has told me that injury is a gift or trying to wish me well by saying, you know, oh, you have the gift of injury, like you learn more about your body or whatever. It's not directed at anyone in particular. I have had multiple people say something similar or to that effect. And it's not directed at anyone person. So if you've told me that I'm not telling you specifically to fuck off. But please don't, don't continue saying that to me if you've heard this podcast because you know how I feel about it at this point. And you know how it makes me feel it actually makes me angry. It makes me sad. But mostly angry. This is a kind of an angry podcast. Let's be honest. So I think pivoting to a more positive note, I think what people really mean is that the gift is perspective and appreciation. And that absolutely is a gift. Right. Appreciation and perspective is a gift. Having the perspective to be able to know that, oh, my body is capable of doing great things when it's not hurt. Being hurt takes away my ability to do things. I didn't realize how much I needed my right arm to do things or two functioning arms. We'll say I didn't realize how much I needed two functioning arms to do things until I had surgery and I didn't have two functioning arms. I realized how much I relied, especially on my right arm to do things. I'm right handed. Right. So I didn't realize how much I relied on my dominant hand to do things until I didn't have it anymore. Try cutting a stake with one hand or opening a bottle of wine. Right. Like you figure things out. And you know, it gives you, it gives you an appreciation for the ability to do things. It gives you an appreciation for your ability. Right. So the appreciation and the perspective is the gift. That's the gift of injury. It's not the injury itself. The injury is a mechanism by which you gain appreciation. The appreciation is the gift. The understanding is the gift. The knowledge you gain is the gift, but injury itself is not a gift. You do everything in our power to avoid injury. And if anything that I've learned from this injury, it's that I want to be capable and able of taking care of myself for as long as humanly possible. It's sucked for six weeks, not being cleared to drive a car. Very small thing. Right. Being able to drive a car. But being wholly dependent on somebody else to get you places that you need to go, including your physical therapy appointments, or somewhere as simple as the pharmacy, which is only a couple miles away. Yes, I'm perfectly aware I could walk there in my sling, but the time dynamics change when you have a 30 minute break in your work day, and you need to get to the pharmacy to pick up your prescription and then drive it back. It's more realistic than walking there and back in 30 minutes. It's not going to happen. Right. So it gives you a new perspective on the ability to be independent. And I very much appreciate my independence. And I'm glad to have restored some of it now that I can drive again. And now that I can start to lift again. The perspective is the gift, the understanding that I want to remain as self sufficient for as long as possible is the gift. Injury is not a gift. Perspective is a gift. Appreciation is a gift. Right. And there's a lot of things we can do to improve our perspective, our appreciation, and also our resilience and reduce our risk of injury. So how do you improve your perspective and appreciation without actually getting injured? Well, hopefully this podcast is helpful. But you can reflect on your own experiences too. But you can the great thing about being human is you can reflect on the perspective of other people. And you can reflect on the experience of other people and take lessons from others without having to go through it yourself. You can observe. Right. So, you know, think about your favorite athlete and, you know, have they ever have you ever seen them get injured. Where they when they came back from injury were they better or worse than they were before. You know, maybe their first injury they were, they seemed like themselves or you know, they came back better. Right. But over the course of their career, if they've been injured a lot, or if they had a catastrophic injury, they were never quite the same again. Like ask Alex Smith about the gift of injury. He got his leg snapped. He almost had his leg amputated. And it took him multiple surgeries. And he hasn't been he hasn't been the same player. And then he had to retire. You know, injury took his career away from him. You know, so we can without having our legs snapped reflect on that and have some perspective that we don't want to have our legs snapped or that we want to stay strong, healthy, mobile, independent for as long as possible. Right. If you've ever seen a loved one, lose their independence because of the ravages of age and time. It makes you realize that you want to stay independent as long as possible. You know, I just recently had a conversation with with a client who, you know, saw their parents struggling in their older age to be healthy and mobile and able to move and do all of the things that they used to be able to do. That's a hard thing to see. And it can give you perspective and make you want to maintain that for yourself. Right. So learn from the perspective of others and or learn perspective by observing others without having to go through the hardships yourself is is one thing we can do. Another thing you can do is actively work on your resiliency. Right. And what does that mean. Well, stop neglecting your mobility work, stop neglecting your flexibility work. And if you're not sure what the distinction is their mobility is the ability of your joints to be able to get to their end ranges and express their entire range of motion that they're supposed to have one healthy. That is mobility that typically refers to joints flexibility is the ability of your muscles and soft tissues to work through those ranges of motion and express their strength. Right. So without those ranges of motion. Right. So without injuring themselves. So if you've ever pulled your hamstring or tweaked a muscle. Right. Because it was not able to express its strength and its end ranges probably need to work on your flexibility. If you've ever hurt a joint. You couldn't go to its end ranges, you probably need to work on your mobility. Right. Most two are complimentary. They go hand in hand, but flexibility and mobility are two parts of resiliency. Right. So is strength strength throughout your entire range of motion is very important as well. Very, very strong working in a particular constrained range of motion, but they don't work on their strength at their end points, right, which increases the risk of injury. So work on it being able to express your strength throughout ranges of motion. And again, that's a product of flexibility mobility and strength. Right. Now we're getting into the multifaceted nature of fitness. Right. So working on your strength throughout all of your ranges of motion. These are some of the things you can do. Another thing you can do is actively decrease your injury risk by programming intelligently. So intelligent programming means not spiking your volume too much too fast too soon or making any significant changes in volume. It's progressive overload. We've talked about this a lot over the last few episodes. Right. I've talked about the specific adaptation to imposed demands, the said principle, general adaptation to impose demands, the get principle, right, general physical preparedness. Any time you take volume, I think the research shows beyond 10 to 15% over previous capability. Once you go beyond that, you start seeing a nonlinear risk of injury, either from joint or muscle. It doesn't matter, soft tissue or joint. There is, there is an increase anytime you extend beyond your current capability. There is an increased risk of injury. Right. But it is a reasonable risk of injury. When you stay within the constraints of 10 to 15% at a time. This is why adaptation takes time because you need to build strength progressively over time in order to not get hurt. Right. That's that's why coaches strengthen conditioning coaches, kettlebell coaches, you know, name the discipline right any any coach that works in the physical space. We are all trained and educated on how to keep our clients safe and how to do progressive overload. Progressive means it needs to be incremental. So you need incremental overload and then you need periods of recovery so that we can adapt. And then what was our old capability is no longer our capability. Now we have new capability because we didn't get hurt. We adapted and now our body has built back stronger. So progressive adaptation without injury is the key to getting better longitudinally. Right. So that means staying within constraints that reasonable constraints of progressive overload, not not spiking your volume, not doing crazy new things. You don't go from running one mile at a time to running 10 to recipe for hurting yourself. Right. So progressive overload managing your volume, doing so intelligently. Right. That is incredibly useful and important for why we periodize the way we do why we program the way we do. Right. So learning how to do progressive overload. If you don't understand those principles or it sounds like too much work with a coach. I know that's a recurring theme weird. I'm a coach. So I think coaches are valuable coaches have coaches. We've talked about that a lot. I will continue to harp on that. So work with a coach doesn't have to be me work with a coach who knows their shit. Right. Another thing you can do is learn to pay attention and auto regulate auto regulation is the ability of or the practice of adjusting your work out or your stimulus based on higher body is feeling within that session or between sessions. So learning how to manage your load regulate your load without needing to think too much about it. You do your warm up and if you feel like you're you're just not there that day or you go through your warm up and your hamstring feels tight on one side knowing what to do how to adjust so you don't get hurt or knowing that you come in. Feeling stressed out tired knowing how to regulate your training so that you don't hurt yourself is an incredibly valuable skill to learn. Right. So I'll do a separate episode on auto regulation because that is semi technical not not too technical but I'll give you I'll do a separate episode on auto regulation and give you the framework that I give to my athletes on how to auto regulate their kettlebell sets. Right. Because I think that's incredibly important. So anyways, with that said, I've been I've been rambling, ranting, whatever you want to call it for for a while now. So I'll wrap up. Don't come at me with the gift of injury. The gift is perspective and appreciation awareness, whatever you want to call it self awareness, that's the gift, not the injury, the injury makes you less than then then you were before it diminishes you more often than none. There are sometimes you can come back stronger than before. I know that, but that doesn't happen very often and doesn't happen longitudinally. If you get injured, especially in the same area over and over again, that's called a repetitive injury and that leads to long term complications. So don't come at me with the gift of injury. And the next time somebody says that to me, I'm going to refer them to this to this episode because injury is not a gift. It is a hardship that we have to overcome and yes, hardship can make you stronger, but with all due respect to niche and Kelly Clarkson, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger is fucking false. False, wrong, unequivocally, objectively, observably wrong. Right, you don't get stronger because you got shot, even if you survive, you're less likely to survive the next time your shoulder doesn't get stronger because you had multiple dislocations, it comes back less than so. I realized Nishi probably met it from a philosophical, you know, existential psychological perspective, your ability to handle stress gets better when you are exposed to stress consistently, I get it. Again, don't at me on this. Take me, take me at my work. You know what I mean, you know what I'm getting at from a purely physical observable what we can express perspective, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger is not true. So work on avoiding injury. And I think they'll all be better for it. So thank you for listening to my angry raps today. I'm coach Jordan. I will see you all next time on the platform podcast have an excellent and healthy training and life. Peace. See you next time. Thank you for listening to this episode of the platform podcast. We'll be back with a new episode soon. Please be sure to leave a rating and review of the platform podcast in your app of choice, support our work by supporting our affiliates. And of course, if you have questions or you want help reaching your goals, reach out to me. Thanks for listening.