Trust Your Gut Feelings and Avoid Injury

Do you trust your gut feelings? There are many times I haven’t. The most serious one, of course, was a feeling I felt for years that the performance of my heart just couldn’t improve.  I was neck-deep in CrossFit, and seemed like no matter what I did–the limiting factor was my heart.  I would even say in the middle of a workout, “My heart just won’t work harder.” I would even rub my heart area on the outside of my chest during a workout. That was a gut feeling that I ignored.  I could have possibly saved myself from  a narrow escape with death a few years later, when I had a massive heart attack. 

Another incident, that I have dubbed “The End of Youth,” was when my 18-year-old nephew challenged me to jump off a tree stump and fly through the air in an attempt to land in a lake down a hill from the stump.  I was 40 at the time. I had a gut feeling this was a bad idea. He went first and landed short of the lake on the beach.  I took a full running start, launched myself into the air, and landed in the lake, simultaneously badly spraining both ankles.  I spent the rest of the vacation crawling around on all fours. 

You’d think I would learn from incidents like this. I have been actively engaging in self-talk about physical feats I should not attempt to do–and yet sometimes I get sucked back in. The last major one was when I was helping a friend move. When we had finished packing up a trailer of his stuff, he jokingly said, “Ok, now we just have to carry the trailer around back.” I could see it was a joke, but the thought got stuck in my head: Can I deadlift the full trailer by myself? It was an odd object, very odd–and I knew it was a bad idea–but I ignored my gut feeling. Well, the answer was yes–I could deadlift the trailer–but at the top of the lift, my right bicep went “pop-pop-pop-pop!” A year of re-hab followed, and it was a year of not doing many of the physical things I love to do.

I haven’t had any major incidents lately, but I shouldn’t be too proud of myself. My 10-year-old son has gotten into doing microworkouts with me, and I’m so thrilled about it. However, at 10, he recovers astoundingly fast from our training sessions. I am so pleased that he wants to train that I never say “No” to a training session with him.  The problem is, he loves it so much he will do 10-12 sets of, for instance, pull-ups in a given day. I can do that and not hurt myself, but often he’ll want to do some other pulling exercise the next day, despite my training programming advice. So I jump in, ignoring my gut feelings, and now I have the start of some elbow soreness that I know from experience is not good. I’ve started to explain to him that his body recovers super fast, and mine has slowed down a lot at 56 years old.  So, I’m trying.  

Your body is communicating with you at all times, and the “gut feeling” is an important aspect of that communication. I’m trying to listen to mine more and more, as well as distinguish between that uncomfortable feeling of doing something new vs. the communication of a gut feeling that is telling me that “this is a bad idea.”

You don’t have to be older for this to be an important topic.  But if you are middle aged or older, it’s more important than ever to listen to that gut feeling, and avoid injury. 

Until next time,

Scott