Staying In It
Something always seems to be flaring. A low back that tightens after long flights, a shoulder that clicks on press day, a hamstring that grabs the first time you run. You are not injured enough to stop, and not right enough to push.
- Add to the end of any session, 3 times a week
- Bands, a bench, light dumbbells
- Ten minutes, and it is the ten minutes people skip
Read this first
This is training, not treatment. If something is actively painful, undiagnosed, or getting worse, that is a conversation for a physician or a physical therapist first. I work alongside medical staff. I do not work instead of them.
The Work
The unglamorous block that keeps people training for decades, plus how I decide what to work around versus what to work on.
The Post-Work Block · Ten minutes, at the end of the session
Three days a week. Attach it to training you are already doing.
Shoulders and Upper Back3 lines
How I want it doneLight. Genuinely light. If you can swing it, it is too heavy to reach the muscle you are aiming at.
The rear shoulder and the mid back are chronically under-trained in anyone who sits and presses. Almost every clicking, impinged shoulder is short on strength back there before it is short on anything else.
Knees and Lower Leg3 lines
How I want it doneSingle leg, always. Doubling up lets the good side quietly carry the bad one, which is how the imbalance survives.
Knees usually complain about what the hip and the ankle are failing to do. Direct work here builds tolerance while the real cause gets addressed upstream.
Hips and Groin2 lines
Adductors are the most commonly strained tissue in field sport and the most commonly ignored in adult training. They are cheap to keep strong and expensive to injure.
Low Back3 lines
How I want it doneSlow. The goal is a trunk that does not move while the limbs do.
Straight out of McGill’s work, which sits on my shelf and shows up in how I program for anyone with a back history. These build endurance in the trunk without loading the spine into the range that provokes it.
Tempo reads eccentric, pause, concentric, pause. X = as fast as possible.
Why it is built this way.
The reasoning, not just the reps.
Most injuries are a spike, not a movement. The research I work from is clear on this: what hurts people is a sudden jump in workload relative to what they have been doing, not the exercise they happened to be doing when it went. This is why the guy who trains twice in six weeks and then plays two hours of tennis gets hurt, and it is why the fix is almost never a list of exercises to avoid.
Train around it. Do not train through it, and do not stop entirely. Stopping is the option most people take and it is the worst one. Deconditioned tissue is less tolerant, so the next flare comes sooner and hurts more. On a real sheet I keep a limitations and modifications column for exactly this. Something is always trainable.
Pain is information about tolerance, not a verdict. The question is never just does it hurt. It is what does it tolerate today, and is that more or less than last week. That turns a vague ache into a number you can actually program against, which is the whole job.
The boring block is the one that keeps you in it. Rear delts, single-leg calf raises, banded knee extensions, adductor work, face pulls. None of it is interesting and none of it is optional. It sits at the end of every session in every program I write, at every level, for everyone.
Build tolerance before you build capacity. Tissue has to be able to handle the position before you load the position hard. This is the sequencing that separates coming back from re-injuring, and it is the part people rush because they feel fine at rest.
More from the library
A sample cannot see how you move.
Everything above is general. Yours would not be. What gets modified, what gets loaded, and what gets left alone entirely depends on what the thing actually is, and that is a conversation, not a page.
See Where You Stand →Two minutes. No program generated, no card required.