Prehabilitation for Bigger PRs

You only get one body, one bag of bones to live your whole life with and that’s it. A little preventative maintenance can go a long way in terms of your long-term health and your career as a lifter.

Simply put, prehabilitation is a combination of mobility work, corrective exercises, self-myofascial release (SMR), compression, and hot/cold therapy designed to keep you injury free. The exact combination will depend on your own problem areas. Every lifter should do some form of prehabilitation work every single day. Taking two minutes to foam roll when you wake up will have a bigger impact than you think in your performance on the platform or on the field. If you live a healthy enough lifestyle and perform the correct preventative movements, your body’s ability to heal will be exponentially greater.

Mobility

A lifter can't have enough mobility. Being efficiently mobile is more than just being able to tie your shoes without breaking a sweat or having to rely solely on your mirrors when you're driving because you can’t turn your fat head to see what’s going on around you. Mobility is more about being able to achieve full range of motion without pain or difficulty. Doing band-aided stretches pre-/post-workout is a great way to increase your mobility almost instantly.

Here's a great article about flossing the hip joint for greater mobility. Along the same lines as band-aided stretching, I like to use band-aided joint distraction as a means of increasing my mobility. This is a technique I learned from the great Donnie Thompson. I strongly encourage everyone to check out his videos on band distraction even if solely for the purpose of seeing a 400-lb man hanging upside down from a monolift while air humping. Seriously though, my squat went from 805 - 870 pounds in one training cycle just by adding distraction stretches into my program.

Prehabilitation Ideas

The reason distraction stretches work so well is because they open up the joint capsules and relieve the stress put on them by tight immobile muscles. For example, take hip distraction. If done correctly, it will set the femur back into the hip capsule and relieve the shearing forces caused by the greater trochanters, which wreak havoc on your hips.

Corrective exercise is another great tool to implement into your program. Corrective exercises work toward fixing imbalances and getting your stabilizers firing correctly. When you teach the stabilizers to stabilize, it allows the bigger prime movers to do their job more efficiently. If you have weak glutes, you can add a few glute bridges into your warm up to get them firing properly in your squat and deadlift.

Self-myofascial release is quite possibly the most utilized form of preventative maintenance out there right now. In order for it to be used optimally, you need to do more than just foam roll your quads every once in a while. Using other implements like the lacrosse and softball will help you get into areas that just wouldn’t be possible with a foam or PVC roller. I like to dig out my scaps with the lacrosse ball and use the softball to get my hips and glutes. If your huge gut engulfs the softball when you try to roll out your hips, you can lay on your back and use a kettlebell to apply pressure to the ball and dig all the gunk out of your hips that way.

Compression therapy is something that I never really paid any attention to until recently. I thought it was just something that you did if you sprained your ankle or tweaked your wrist. I always viewed it more as a rehabilitation technique than for prevention, but again I was proven wrong by Super D. When I was watching one of his videos on elbow pain, I noticed that he uses a lot of compression therapy in his pre-workout routines. I started tinkering around with some different combinations of compression and some of the aforementioned techniques, and I found that what gave me the best results was three to five minutes of compression followed by self-myofascial release followed by a second round of three to five minutes of compression. Using two pairs of knee wraps work best for compressing both legs at the same time, and about seven feet of the green or blue physical therapy bands work best for your arms. If possible, try to have someone else wrap your arm because the band will start to roll up at the elbow and rip out a lot of arm hair.

Upon doing some digging through scientific material, I found that compression therapy has been proven to do the following:

• Enhance blood circulation to the peripheral limbs
• Reduce blood lactate concentration during maximal exercise bouts
• Enhance warm up via increases in skin temperature
• Increase torque generated at the joints
• Improve performance and reduce the risk of injury
• Enhance recovery following strenuous exercise by aiding in the removal of blood lactate and improving subsequent exercises performance

Hot/cold showers can do wonders for your recovery time. The only problem I have with them is that they suck. I mean it is really unpleasant turning the water from boiling lava hot to ice cold. I’m sure anyone who does this on a regular basis can attest to the highly attractive faces that one makes when the cold water gets cranked all the way up. It's the face of pure shrinkage. All the unpleasant feelings aside, there is a measurable difference in one’s recovery time, so it's a worthwhile practice in my opinion. There is also a good amount of scientific evidence to support that cold therapy on its own improves your ability to recover more quickly. On a side note, it's best to do this in the privacy of your own home for obvious reasons.

Here's a sample prehabilitation routine that anyone can integrate into his lifting program:

**Notes: For the post-training where it says compression, SMR, and then compression again, do that as one circuit—three minutes of compression, SMR, and then three more minutes of compression.

The final tactic for keeping yourself injury free is to splurge every once in a while. Go to the chiropractor a few times per month for an adjustment. Get a real massage if foam rolling isn’t doing it for you. You're going to spend time and money on your health one way or another. Whether it’s $15 for a foam roller or $1500 at the emergency room is up to you.