Sensible Training Guidance & And Avoiding The Pitfalls Of Training

Welcome to the Back Pain Solutions Podcast – Sensible Training Guidance & And Avoiding The Pitfalls Of Training

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Listen To The Episode Below

Episode Introduction

When I was young, I had one goal and that was to be strong, fast and smart in whichever sport I did. I did waterpolo, swimming, athletics, rugby, cricket, triathlon and tennis. All at quite a high level and others competing for my province at home in South African. In other words, it was very competitive! I was running on hard surfaces and with not the best nutrition, recovery strategy or rest. My knowledge of what was good for my body and how to build tolerance was non-existent. I had on and off days and could never understand why I had an off day. I thought it was just normal. Looking back, I now know that I was shooting in the dark and sometimes had a hit and sometimes missed. I wish I had more knowledge, resources for a better training strategy and a mentor.

In this episode Jacob discusses aspects of training that he wishes someone had brought to his attention when he was younger. Aspects which would have helped him to understand his body better and what it needed as a young guy going all out numerous times a week in the gym or field. In doing so, we hope to help listeners to avoid pitfalls in their own training and be more resilient to injury.

Some of the things you’ll discover:

Which aspects to consider when training
Why it is important to re-evaluate your training philosophy regularly
Why nutrition is key to limiting off days at the gym or on the field
Why listening to reputable strength and conditioning coaches or sports scientists is a very good idea
Learning which exercises is dangerous long term for joint health is a mush, especially when you are young

Episode Highlights

Find out why you should pay attention to the aspects in this podcast to lay a solid foundation which will later look after you when you need your body for other things besides training or work. When you are young and inexperienced you often act carelessly, and to a certain extent this is needed, acting as a learning school but what we learn from it and how we apply this really matters when it comes to long term joint and physical health. We want our bodies to function in later life close to how we functioned as young adults. This is possible if we understand that our body’s need a certain stimulation in the gym or sports field allowing us to build tolerance in a joint sparing way.

Episode Transcription

Intro 0:00
When we’re young, we move with freedom and confidence with a great resilience to injury. But somewhere along the line, we develop poor habits and become more vulnerable to back pain, back pain solutions features evidence based and practical advice to help you take back control of your health and get back to the activities you love. This is your guide to better back health through movement. So join us as we demystify some of the commonly held beliefs about back pain and build your confidence to a stronger back the smartway.

Jacob Steyn 0:28
Welcome back to the back pain solutions podcast. This is Jacob and today I’m going to talk about something that I wish I had told myself when I was 20 years younger. And that is advice to myself when I was training as a 16 1820 year old boy, if I might call myself that. So I’m going to do a solo today. And that means I won’t be doing it together with Ben. Which means you’re going to listen to my voice for the next 20 or so minutes. And I’m going to hopefully help young guys who are fanatic about training like I was back in the day, understand maybe their approach a little bit better, or to reassess their approach. And ultimately make sure that they don’t end up on the going or having serious injuries. Like I had my very serious low back injury when I was what’s it now 38 about it’s exactly nine years ago, so I was 29 I had my low back hernia. And it was a it was a an episode of my life that definitely threw me in a different cause. And it changed the direction of my of my goals and my work. And while everything that I do has been affected by that specific injury. So what I hope to clarify a little bit today is that it’s not necessary to have such a dramatic experience as I did to learn and ultimately become good at what you do when it comes to your training or the personal health. So the the points I want to talk about today is firstly, you know if I can give advice that before things that I’d say to young guys, and I mean, this podcast, also applicable to two young ladies training phonetically. But I think I feel like I can give better advice to, especially the guys out there that find themselves in my situation when you’re young, and you’re fanatic about wanting to be strong and big and perform and you know, everything that goes without showing off, then I have a very good experience in that. So that’s why I specifically talk to two young guys. So the four things are, first of all, listen to listen to experienced coaches, who knows about rehabilitation. There’s a lot of coaches and a lot of pseudo coaches or guys we can follow on YouTube. And I think a lot of them does not consider the rehabilitative aspect, or very much of what makes your training safe. And that’s a big aspect that you have to consider. Not only going all out, but making sure that there’s some joint spirit going on some periodization some full body complex movements that are not compromising certain parts of your body. You know, we want to make sure that the the weighing scale, in terms of your outcome isn’t compromised by what you have to suffer or go through in terms of joint health. And then the second thing would be not training or training until having pain isn’t always the way to go. There are different forms of pain when you train I remember when I used to have a rugby training, you know your tongue hanging out of your mouth like a like a dog, you have pain in your whole body, but that’s more because of oxygen, oxygen deprivation, because of pushing yourself all the way forward for an hour and a half. But I’ve also had training sessions in a gym where I had low back pain and I just worked through it and I thought you know that’s, you know, the more pain I have in my lower back. The better it is the more I’m going to grow and get stronger. And unfortunately from my my experience later, it was not the case. It was actually Quite the opposite, I was breaking down instead of building up. Third thing we will talk about as reassess your training philosophy over and over and over and over. So something I’ve done the last few years is, every couple of years, I really, I invest in doing courses, I go and listen and look at the researchers and I hear what they have to say, and there’s some amazing guys out there, you know, pick one, follow him for a little bit, learn from him, and build layers of experience. But reassess that training philosophy. So you don’t end up just doing the same thing over and over and over. The knowledge we have in the training world is always there’s always evolution, it’s always changing, there’s always new things coming out. Also, if you want to keep it interesting, don’t get stuck in doing the same thing over and over. And then the last thing is nutrition. And luckily, I come from South Africa, where we, we had some really good food, at least when I was younger, I know it’s, the food industry has gotten bigger over there. And so that means less vegetables, and meat less or more processed food would be the case in South Africa, unfortunately, so. But if you think of nutrition, especially when you’re young, I think that when I was young, I did not think about nutrition, let’s put it that way. So I ended up you know, eating to get the full. And otherwise I would just train and do my thing. And I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t understand why some days, I would have a lot of energy, I feel very strong. And other days, I would just work so hard to stay with the other guys. You know whether it was playing cricket, tennis, rugby, athletics, water, Polo, swimming. Whatever I did, I did quite a few sports. When I was younger, I had really amazing days where I had a lot of energy, my performance was peak. And I just felt like, Okay, I’m just moving forward, and I had days where I really struggled. And if we stand still, for a second, we can analyze that we can break it down, or we can see whether it’s because we had poor sleep lately, maybe I’m dehydrated, or, frankly, I just haven’t been getting in the nutrients I should repair as I’ve been asking way too much for my body last few training sessions, and maybe also from being on school to study. So let’s look at the first point listening to experiencing experienced coaches, who knows something about rehabilitation, I think if you bring that aspect into your training philosophy, then you’ll end up with a little bit more confidence in making sure that you don’t destroy your body where you shouldn’t, and you actually build where it’s needed. What I like, I like Stuart McGill, Professor Stuart McGill, when he says you know, all you got to do is build tolerance. And so if you can ask yourself with every exercise, am I building tolerance? Or am I breaking my tolerance down, then you have your answer to that exercise. And, you know, if we think of the idea of super compensation after every exercise or training session, we break down and the idea is to recover so much, or just enough that we end up a little bit higher, a little bit better than where we started before the training. And so what I used to do when I was younger is just train like a maniac, and end up breaking down with no super compensation, which meant that I actually move down the scale of getting stronger and, and building endurance and building tolerance. But because I had good food and I was out in the sun in South Africa, I think I recovered well enough to be able to cope with all of it. But unfortunately, my strategy wasn’t brilliant. When we think of rehabilitation, as an aspect of our training or our training philosophy, the reason why I have that word in there is because we want to, we want to train that tolerance and make sure that we we spare the back for example, so we don’t want to bother up our backs. We want to get really strong in the core in a way that’s gonna help us to last with our low backs. I’m now 38 and I have a little one that just turns one In exactly two days, and I feel the demand on my back every day when I’m with, with William, because I have to pick them up, I have to put them down, I have to put them to sleep, you know, they just movements, which are incredibly difficult to control. And it’s just it’s a lot. And so your back health, at my age will be very much determined at what you did when you were 22, your 30s? You know, do does your back have a lot of kilometres on it? Or does it actually have you spared your spine, and you can take a lot more when you’re older. So that’s a very good point to keep in mind. Then, like I mentioned training until having pain isn’t the way to go. It is what I thought I thought it was the way to go. But actually make sure that when you do complex movements, the skill level is low. So if you’re getting fatigued and tired, you don’t end up hurting yourself, you don’t end up with tissue damage where it’s not needed. And I’m especially referring to the joints. Because you want to go a long way with your joints. And, frankly, what I tell people when I do workshops, is I you know, we train, we want to train in a way where we’re 5560 and still banging it out and giving it all then you know you’ve been doing it well. But unfortunately, as a chiropractor, I end up seeing people on a weekly basis between the age of 20 and 30 with a hernia or serious issues which could have been avoided. If the foundation where they do their CrossFit training or the gym work or whether it’s any other sport, that foundation has been laid properly. So if you understand what that foundation would mean to you, I think you’d be very well motivated to make sure that you do a good job at understanding what you’re doing to your body when you train. So the third point was to reassess your training philosophy. And by doing this, I don’t mean throw your training philosophy away every couple of months or every couple of years. I simply mean that you need to reassess, adjust, maybe add, maybe find a way to make it more safe. If you have any injuries, like I have a niggly shoulder, as a chiropractor, I have to push and use a lot of force with my shoulder and awkward movements. And I’ve also played rugby for 15 years. So I know my shoulder has undergone quite a lot of hammering and I need to be a little bit careful. So I do things to stabilize it, I’m careful when it comes to depths because of the forward moving of the of the shoulder joint. And the not so a strong anterior aspect of my shoulder joint capsule. And if I do to any of those things, I know that I’m going to have a little bit of a tingling sensation down my arm. And that’s not good. We want to avoid anything like that. That’s not building tolerance. That’s breaking down. And so my suggestion is find out who are good researchers, or good strength and conditioning coaches who looks at the research at least, who has a lot of experience with training quite often high level people. That’s how they end up in the in the sphere and become well known generally that they’re a little bit older, and not that young. That’s definitely something that I would make a prerequisite otherwise they will not have the experience. The last thing is nutrition. So very simply said, if you are someone who is training for five times a week, and you have a stressful job, you are quite busy. You are having at least three of those five sessions where you’re really pumping are really going for it. You have to understand that you’re going to be depleting a lot of nutrients. And if there isn’t a strategy to replace these nutrients continuously then you will you will deplete and when you run out of those you will start breaking down it’s just as simple as that it will be a system that you cannot keep up you cannot continue pushing At that rate, if you’re not getting the recovery, that’s the key word is the recovery. And the recovery starts with rest and fuel. And the fuel is your nutrition, and nutrition, I specifically refer to micronutrients and protein on top of enough fat and carbohydrates depending on your, your specific goals, and of course, depending on your body type. So, when I was 20, I lived in South Africa and I know that we specific we, we ate a lot of meat, you know, quite often we hunt and have wild game. Otherwise, the the the beef we eat, we ate was grass fed at walked free on on the land, you know, in the nature. So it was a very high quality meat. Same with the vegetables, you know, quite often wasn’t sprayed and, and I know that that really fueled my body. But if I had a weekend away, or I ended up eating bread with jam, and very, you know, very poor nutritional choices, for a few days, I definitely noticed it. But it never, it was never enough for me to to make the link of our it this. This is the reason why I’m underperforming the last few days. This is the reason why I’m struggling in the water polo match. So I can I would really like to encourage you to create a system where you make sure based on the energy expenditure, if you’re keeping up that three, four or five training sessions a week, make sure you find a way to get in daily enough protein. Make sure that micronutrients are coming in through enough vegetables, my recommendation quite often is at least twice a day, a piece of meat, fish or chicken together with mixed vetch, mixed vege steamed so often the best way. And you will notice that you find the balance and be able to keep up the balance between the energy expenditure training, recovery and putting the fuel back in your body. So I’m going to stop there. I want to say thank you to everybody, for listening. This was a short one, hopefully useful to myself 20 years ago, if you would relate to anything I said. And I wish you a great training session coming. Thank you. And please head over to the website, smart strong.co.uk Have a look there at the information we’ve got to you. And please like our podcast on iTunes or whichever platform you’re listening to. Please keep keep listening to the information we have coming. Thank you

Transcribed by https://otter.ai