I happened last Tues doing OHS. The gym here is somewhat of a “globo” gym, so they don’t have anything like bumper plates, or anything CrossFit related. The rack is too wide to set your hands for OHS right out of the rack. So we’ll just take it off in a rack position, set our hands, jerk it overhead, do the reps, and either bring it back to rack position, or drop the weight. My partner was dropping the weight after his sets. The manager came over after a while, and started complaining about dropping the weight. When I finished my set, I was bringing the weight back to the rack position, and for some reason completely unknown to me, my buddy decided he was going to help bring it down on his side. The guy on the other side wasn’t paying attention, and the weight came down pretty hard on my shoulder. I could feel it slip out a little, but I decided I was going to power through it. Chalk it up to me being a big dumb Pollock. Next set at 205 lbs it slipped a little bit on the jerk, and I told myself I was going stop for the day. I sat around for about 5 minutes while the guys were finishing the workout, and pride got the best of me. I decided to keep going and did 205, 215, 220, and 225. On my last rep of 225 lbs I guess I lost control of the bar, and didn’t bail in time. The weight came backwards and ripped my shoulder out of socket. The journey after that is about 3 hours of hilarity of me getting kicked out of aid stations while on my quest to find someone competent enough to reset my shoulder.
After reading this, three separate single syllable auditory responses came out my mouth.
Dude. Wow. Fuck.
I am not taking away from your effort or desire. Actually, I appreciate the level of “hard-headedness” you displayed during the overhead squat. My brother Ed and I would count you as one of our own for your achievement. But what can we learn from our fallen comrade’s mistake? Take this into account before you answer, ”Those that do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it” – George Santayana. Or to quote my Dad, “Only an idiot won’t learn from the mistakes of others”.
And since I am throwing out quotes to live by…”Show me someone that is fine with losing and I will show you a loser” – Steve Yurosek. I love that one.
If you do not have the facility or the equipment to do the workout, then you need to check your ego at the door and scale, change or adjust it. You will not hurt my feelings if you change the workouts. If you only have metal plates and cannot drop them, then change the rep scheme. Instead of doing heavy doubles of overhead squat, do sets of 8-12 reps. It will still be crushing work but wont be so heavy you dislocate your shoulder with a simple mistake by a spotter. Or maybe you do single arm overhead squat with a DB or KB. Or realize overhead squats are stupid and the best place for a bar is on your back.
If you are on the 3rd floor of your gym lifting weights and it calls for “Deadlifts & Sprint 100 meters” and after you get done with your deadlifts you run down 3 flights or stairs to run 100 meters and round 3 you trip and break your leg…you should have changed the workout so you could have walked out to train another day.
These workouts are done and designed with a certain facility and equipment in mind. My gym is a 5000 sq/ft warehouse in an industrial slow traffic industrial park with 80 feet of pull up structure, platforms, rubber, dumbbells and sleds, 50 bars and metal plates and bumpers totaling in multiple tons. The reason Rogue Fitness does so well and you find many CF gyms around the country is people wanted to train like this and could not in the constraints of their local Ballys, 24 or Equinox.
The great thing about the program is you can scale or change it to meet your personal needs. Those changes can be due to injury, cramped space, lack of equipment or a manger that doesn’t allow weight dropping. Don’t let your ego or desire to compete in a comment section filled with funny handles like Trose and Jaybird and their inflated times put you in harms way…kidding with the inflated times.
Training is just that, training, hence the word “training”. If you are training, then you are training for a reason or a bigger goal. If you get hurt in your training, you do not get to attain or meet the goal you are training for. Especially, if your job has a physical nature or you are MIL/LEO and get hurt during a workout doesn’t allow you to do our job.
My advice is to be smart. I have been hurt more times than I care to admit. I have had 6 surgeries; four on my right knee, one on my left knee and one on my right shoulder. A broken leg, fractured toe, broken collarbone, dislocated fingers, torn calf, no ligaments in either ankle and a squished melon to match and I don’t wish it on anyone. All those injuries were done while getting paid to do it. I knew I would get hurt, but my goal was to never get hurt in training, if I was going down it was in the heat of the fight and not in practice.
Be smart and just know there is anyways another workout coming tomorrow. How do I know? Because I post them and at this time I have no plans on stopping.
i rather enjoy trying to figure out how to best sub due to time/space/distance/equipment constraints to garner the stimulus/benefit as workout intended- thanks as always for the great site and programming-
Dumbells up to 120.
I love your posts, John. I can totally understand this guys dedication, and respect it completely. However, like Mike D, most of my workouts, be they CF Main site, CFFB, or CFE, all end up needing to be tweaked for the surroundings. Lacking any sort of power rack or squat racks definitely puts a hitch in our giddy-up! We’re limited on the overhead presses to what we can clean, which is probably good from an overall safety point of view, but also skews everything a bit as well. Either way, keep up the awesome work, sir!!
That sucks to hear. I also learned the hard way. Somewhere in my mid 20s I decided that I wanted to bench 500 lbs. raw, having come from a powerlifting background. I’d made it up to a double at 455 and was pretty excited. I got into Crossfit. The handstand pushups at 295 were a mistake. Long story shirt, ruptured triceps tendon and a brutal surgery. I wish I could say I did it throwing a block that helped result in a Super Bowl win…but the ego check is so necessary.
Great post John. This site rocks.
Can’t say if it was ego or pride, I like to think it was pride, but I would have to say “That which drives us to excell can also be the same thing that makes us fail.” Fortunately most growth comes from failure. I learned a very valuable lesson from this experience, and hopefully this article can save someone else from my fate.
Training is just that, training, hence the word “training”
Love it!
Great post! This is a kick-ass site.
[…] He is also a 9-year veteran of the NFL. I ran across a great post on John’s blog titled “Be Smart” (warning: contains some profanity). He does a great job describing the importance of training […]