#72: Lifting with Injuries & Age-Related Issues

We're not 20 anymore. 

Our bodies have been through LIFE, and that means that most of us have some area of our bodies that don't work quite so perfectly anymore.

😬 Maybe it's a cranky knee. 

😬 Maybe you have arthritis in your joints. 

😬 Or maybe you've got a recent injury.

Those do not need to stop you from lifting weights and keeping your body strong and fit. 

In episode #72, I share what training with injuries and age-related wear-and-tear is like, and how you can modify your training to accommodate your limitations so you can keep lifting.

Enjoy the show!

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 0:22 Preparing for a Greek Sailing Adventure
• 0:54 The Importance of Strength Training
• 2:01 Dealing with Injuries and Setbacks
• 2:46 Personal Experience with Knee Pain
• 5:29 Adapting Workouts to Avoid Pain
• 7:41 Training Through Injuries: A College Memory
• 9:32 Consulting Specialists for Injury Management
• 14:26 The Importance of Warm-Ups and Mobility
• 15:50 Final Thoughts and Encouragement

Transcript

POD72 - Training with Injuries & Age-related issues 

Welcome to 40+ Fitness for Women. I'm Lynn Sederlöf-Airisto, your host, and I'm a certified menopause fitness coach helping women in perimenopause and menopause build the bodies that they want to spend the rest of their lives in. So helping you to get strong and fit.

And today I'm actually recording a few podcasts ahead of time because I'm heading on vacation this coming weekend.

It is the first time I'm ever doing this kind of thing. I'm going sailing in Greece. I mean, does that sound amazing or what? So, so, but a little bit of prep still to do. You will be listening to this actually once I have gotten back, but I hope you are having a wonderful summer wherever you are. I have been actively in the weight room now that I finally, um, have been able to lift full steam ahead.

And of course, since I know that I'm going to be spending 10 days basically living in a bikini, I have gone bikini shopping, have four new bikinis that I will be wearing on my trip and trying to get the last muscle built before I go. And this year I actually did not go on a diet. Though, I was thinking about it because it would have been nice to maybe lose just a smidge of body fat to get a little bit below where I would normally be.

Because of course, then your muscles show a little bit better and maybe you feel a little bit more confident in that bikini. But for various reasons that failed, and maybe I'll actually do a little podcast about that because I think it might be a. Thought process that could be useful to you as you think about weather and how to go into that calorie deficit.

But today I'm going to talk about something that happened to me yesterday that got me thinking and I did a story on it and I got quite a bit of response from the story. So I think this is maybe something that a lot of people are struggling with. And that is that, you know, we are not 20 anymore, and that means that our bodies have lived through a lot.

If you're like me, that you have been an athlete, trained when you were younger, maybe got injured,. Those may be coming back to haunt you in your old age or the fact that you are, you know, a little bit weaker.

Maybe you've had an injury, these kinds of things and what to do. 

So what happened to me yesterday as I was training doing Lower Body Day was that I ran, head on into one of my, well, it's not an old injury, actually, it is wear and tear on my body. So a few months back I had had this incident where, my knee just started hurting me and it had like been a little bit funny feeling. After walking that day, and then in the evening, as I was doing my normal warmups for weight training, it just felt funny. So I had left. the kinds of exercises like, Bulgarian split squats and these kinds of things where the knee gets bent a lot. I'd left them out of my training session that evening.

And yet my knee was super painful that night and really painful the following day. And so I went to the doctor because of course I'm not going to mess around with my knees. I need those things to be working pretty well. You are in a lot of trouble if you don't have functioning knees. So they're one of the body parts that I'm not going to mess with.

So I went to the doctor and he said, yeah, you've got fluid in your knee. And here are some painkillers and if it doesn't go away in a couple of weeks, then we'll take a picture of it. So a couple of weeks went by, it still was not feeling like itself. And you know, because I lift heavy, I want to be sure that I don't need to be worried about my knee.

Right? I mean, I just mentally need to know that yes, my knee can tolerate lifting heavy and doing the things that I want to do with it. So I went for the MRI and it turned out that it was just normal wear and tear age that for some reason had gotten irritated. I mean, my knees are not like pristine 20 year old knees, they're are the knees of a woman who has danced ballet, played competitive sports, uh, run on hard cement for many, many years. So of course there is going to be some wear on those knees, what the MRI revealed was just normal wear and tear. And what the orthopedic surgeon then said to me was, Get back in the weight room. It is super important for your knees that you keep your leg muscles in shape to support your knees, you know, as you age. And he said, you can do anything that doesn't hurt.

So. I went back and I started playing with the various exercises that I normally do and figuring out what doesn't hurt. And it did mean modifications to my training. So for example, on the leg press, because doing an extreme knee bend, like to 90 degrees, not extreme, but you know, 90 degree knee bend, and then straightening, it was too much.

So my range of motion was Very, very small in the beginning, but you know, I would do what my knee could take where I felt like no pain whatsoever in the knee. And then week after week, it was able to tolerate a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more. But every now and again, I'll have one of those days when my knee says, Nope, today you're not bending me and making me push heavy things.

So yesterday was definitely one of those days. And instead of just throwing in the towel and heading home, what I did was I took on some different exercises. So I did let my knee rest because it was irritated that I knew that even just lowering the range of motion would maybe not be a good idea. So I instead did some exercises that don't require me to bend my knee.

So I switched from doing leg presses and actually glute thrusts were something that my knee also wasn't letting me do yesterday. And I switched to doing hyper extensions and RDLs and actually also leg extensions. That was something that it did allow me to do. 

So I think that's a really good illustration of being able to still train, you know, with an injury and, Hey, you know, that's just my knee. So it just limited certain activities. My whole upper body, I can do whatever with. I mean, there is no upper body exercise that requires my knee to do something that's uncomfortable for it.

And I am able to find lower body exercises that work just fine with my knee, as on those days when it's not letting me train. And I think, you know, I had this kind of aha moment actually back in college about training when injured training after injury. And I am Like I said, you need to put yourself in the hands of specialists in these kinds of things.

But I had one of my teammates who tore her ACL and I remember because she went in for surgery and it was a matter of days before she was on the sideline. With our trainer. So we had a physical therapist that worked with the team with division one lacrosse at Dartmouth. One of the perks of, of going to a, uh, division one school is that they, each team has a trainer.

Cause injuries happen and they want to keep the athletes going. So anyway, as the rest of us were doing our normal practice, Margaret would be training with our, trainer on the sideline. And man doing all kinds of things. And I could see that some of the exercises were hurting her, but, she was in the hands of a professional, pushing her the way that she needed to be pushed at that point.

 And that's when I kind of had the light bulb moment that when you have some kind of issue, rest is not always best. Okay. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is. And for sure, Margaret couldn't go straight into her rehab training and in my knee case. He did try like, Hey, let's see if it calms down by two weeks of not doing anything.

But a lot of times movement is medicine and it really takes doing something. And, even if you have to rest that one part of your body, you don't need to rest all parts of your body. 

So my recommendation, if you have an area of your body that's bothering you or hurts is please see a specialist about it. I like to use physical therapists, but I am also very, very quick to go to an orthopedic surgeon if it is something that hurts a little bit more because you don't want it to start getting chronic.

 I would recommend. A sports doctor who is going to look at your injury and think about it from a point of view of, Hey, this person wants to get back into doing things actively.

And We'll figure out your path to getting back there and not just be like, okay, you're getting old. Let me just have you sit there on the sideline for the rest of your life. Because the thing is that when you do sit there on the sideline and you're taking that rest, you are losing muscle.

 this became abundantly clear to me as. I had to take a break this year. I had some surgery and I was completely out of being allowed to exercise, walk, whatever for a couple of weeks or was it three weeks? Man, it's amazing. Time flies and you forget these things, but anyway, it was weeks of not.

Being able to exercise really at all. And then I was allowed to go back into the weight room and train parts of my body, but not all of my body. So it was my lower body that I was allowed to go back in and train with the machines, 

and then I was allowed to gradually get back into training my upper body. And it has taken me What? March, April, May, three months, three months to get back to the level, the strength levels that I was at before. I mean, some parts of my body recovered more quickly, so I got, you know, bicep curls back up to the 10 kilos pretty quickly.

But for example, my chin ups, my pull ups, those are the, those are the ones that were My beloved, beloved pull ups are the ones that are taking the longest to get back . So I'm finally now back to where I was, , in January. So for that reason, I encourage you that if you do have an injury, figure out what is it that you can do.

And if I think about some examples of clients I've had, so this is how, you know, because my clients are 40 plus, so they have these kinds of issues. So like my one client who had dislocated her shoulder multiple times in group fitness classes. 

 What we did with her is that her physical therapist gave her, her upper body exercises to do. And. And then I programmed the rest of her body. So there she was able to continue like a normal strength training program on her lower body. And then specific exercises from her physical therapist. And some of those were things that I could have very well programmed, but it was good that since the physical therapist understands that injury and what.

Things you really want to strengthen when you have that kind of injury that she get the programming from the physical therapist. Another client was having some knee issues and luckily works in a hospital. So I said, Hey, you have some physical therapist colleagues. Could you have them watch you do a squat?

, we were doing box squats at that point and that was bothering her knees so the physical therapists watched her do the box squats and with their trained physical therapist eyes were able to see that there was some weakness in other places in her body.

And so they said, Hey, you should be doing these kinds of exercises. And so I incorporated those into her program. So we did some strengthening of all kinds of muscles in her lower body to help her with that. And she's gotten so, so, so much stronger.

So that definitely didn't stop her from making progress and moving forward.

And of course there was the example of me and my knee. So I was avoiding certain exercises because my knee couldn't take it. And now that my knee is. Starting to be more used to this again, after that little bit more acute situation, I'm slowly getting back into, you know, Bulgarians and these kinds of things.

But it does take, really listening to your body and understanding the difference between when something, you know, feels hard because you're actually working your muscles, working your body, , in a correct way. And when something feels. off and be quick to respond to the off. And sometimes it's just a day, you know, maybe you've been sitting in a weird position and so your body feels off.

And, and actually, this is one of the reasons why I do recommend doing mobility exercises before you start. So you're moving and lubricating your joints of the area of your body that you're going to use. So your hips, your ankles, your knees, your shoulders, your wrists.

And if something feels odd, then you already know at that point that, okay, I need to like be listening to this a little bit more. And absolutely doing warm upsets. So one of my mistakes yesterday was I kind of rushed through my warmup of my leg presses. And clearly that was a bad idea. Leg press is something that I normally warm up very, very well.

carefully on like adding load slowly and, you know, slowly in small increments so that I can feel if, Hey, is my knee okay? And get my knee used to, Hey, you're going to be asked to do more and more and more. And yesterday I kind of tried a quicker warmup and, Yeah. Well, disastrous consequences. So, so warmups are important.

Listening to your body is important. Getting instructions from professionals so that you know what you can do with your body, what's safe to do and getting tips from them is important.

All right. So this was a quick one, but for all of you, probably most of you who have had some wear and tear on your body and some areas that don't feel so good, please do not let that stop you from getting started because honestly, this is one of the biggest questions that I get from people, Hey, I've had this injury or Hey, I have a shoulder that's like this or I have a wrist like that or my ankle like this and whatever.

And I always say to them, Please talk to a physical therapist, find out what you are allowed to do, and then we can modify your programming accordingly. Or if you're not doing one to one coaching with me, then you learn how to modify your programming accordingly. 

So I will, , finish with that. And as always, I really, really appreciate you listening to my podcast.

I love, love, love to hear from you. And if you have any questions, then jump into my DMs or my messenger. Or you can email me. I mean, I love, love, love to hear from you. So, um, so that's it from for this week and hopefully you are having a wonderful June and I'll talk to you next week in the meanwhile, happy training.