Hey, guys!
I’m a -120kg powerlifter and started training about ten years ago. This year I was able to perform a 312.5kg deadlift, a 210kg bench and a 260kg squat (in training). Sadly I managed to reaggravate an old back injury with new symptoms not only once but twice in one year. Every one of these reaggravations sets me back at the very least a month before I am able to hit close to PR weight again.
Since injuries/pain seem to be the main factor that holds me back from progressing, I am trying to figure out how to reduce the risk of injury and what role pain plays in training.
A simplified injury mechanism (doing too much, too quickly or too heavy) make sense for injury prevention. The problem that I am facing is that I have much more training sessions where I can feel some sort of pain that inhibits me in force output than sessions in which i feel that force production is limiting me. So I have a couple of questions for the readers:
- How much pain is reasonable for training?
- Do you reduce load/volume as soon as you see a pain pattern (e.g. repeated shoulder pain for many weeks with bench pressing)?
- Do you just ignore pain as long as it does not get worse?
- Is lifting without pain even a reasonable goal? (in this case I mean joint pain etc. not just the general feel of heavy training being hard)
- Do you ignore painful warmups as long as the heavy working sets feel okay? I have noticed over the years, that a proper mindset (and banging music) before starting a lift can supress pain during heavy sets. But since I get hurt so often, I wonder if I am going in the wrong direction with this strategy.
Sorry for the wall-of-text.
Best regards,
Lorenz