On a cold autumnal morning in November 2023, I got out of bed, got dressed, hydrated, had my pre-workout meal, and drove to the gym to complete a pull day workout consisting of deadlifts, rows, weighted chin-ups and barbell curls.
The workout went fine until I started performing my work sets of weighted chin-ups.
The gym was busy, and I couldn’t use the regular pull-up bar because they were all occupied.
So, I had to use the monkey bars to perform the weighted chin-ups.
I was already warmed up from the previous exercises, so I went straight into the work sets. I had a belt tied to my waist with a chain on, and attached to the chain was a 15kg plate.
I was doing chin-ups with my body weight and 15kg attached, so the total weight lifted was around 95kg because I weighed around 80kg (80kg + 15kg = 95kg).
I grab the pull-up bar with both my hands and the 15kg weight plate attached and start repping out chin-ups; my goal is to hit 4-6 reps for three sets.
While performing the first several reps, I felt an uncomfortable pull in my wrist and stopped the exercise.
My wrist was painful, and it felt unstable, but it wasn’t excruciating ( maybe a 6/10 in regards to the severity of the pain).
After experiencing this, I rest and try again. It still doesn’t feel right, so I perform dumbbell curls. They didn’t feel right either.
I go home, shower, get dressed, start working, and get on with my day. A couple of days later, I tried to perform my leg workout, but gripping the bar for barbell squats didn’t feel right, and I realised there was a serious problem with my right wrist (to make things worse, it was my dominant wrist).
So, I gave myself a 2-week break from the gym.
After the 2 weeks were up, the pain was still there, but I tried to go back to lifting, thinking, “Maybe my wrist is weak after the injury and needs to be strengthened”, so I tried to train for a few weeks.
The pain was still there.
I then saw my general practitioner (GP) at the local doctor’s surgery centre, and he gave me a wrist splint to wear for a few weeks.
It didn’t help.
A few weeks later, the GP authorised an ultrasound for me on my wrist. When I had the ultrasound, the doctor couldn’t find a cause for my pain; he said, “It’s probably just mild tendonitis”.
I gave my wrist more time to heal, then saw a physiotherapist to help me with correctional exercises, hoping this would fix the problem.
Nothing helps.
I wait several more months, then see an orthopaedic surgeon who requests an MRI scan of my wrist.
He finds no cause for my wrist pain on the MRI and tells me to start using my wrist as usual again.
I couldn’t deal with the pain any longer, so I asked him to refer me to a soft tissue wrist specialist.
I went to see the specialist, and he gave me a steroid injection in my wrist, hoping to reduce any inflammation in my wrist that might have been causing the pain.
It didn’t work.
The next option was wrist keyhole surgery to find a cause for my wrist pain (and hopefully fix my wrist) because the specialist said MRIs could only be 70% correct, meaning my diagnosis had probably gone undetected so far.
In December 2024, I was put under general anaesthetic and had my wrist surgery.
The surgeon found a Triangular fibrocartilage complex (tfcc) tear and repaired it the operation lasted around 2 hours.
As of writing this article, I’m almost 9 weeks post-op, and my wrist is improving.
Don’t Get Injured
Why did I develop the injury? It’s because of a few factors.
- I was getting back into weighted chin-ups after a period of not doing them and added too much weight too quickly.
- My weighted chin-up form could have been better. I was in a rush the day I got injured and was going through the motions.
- It was a cold morning, and I should have warmed up more before performing the weighted chin-ups. I should have performed 2- 3 sets of 6 reps of bodyweight chin-ups before doing my work sets. This would have warmed up my wrist joints, reducing the likelihood of sustaining the injury.
What I’m Going To Do Moving Forward
I won’t do pull-ups or chin-ups anymore (definitely not weighted ones). Instead, I’ll use the lat pulldown exercise and focus on perfect form. I’ll use a full range of motion. The lat pulldown is as effective as the chin-up as it targets the same muscles as you do in the chin-up.
What You Can Take Away from My Experience
- Warm up properly before completing any heavy sets.
- Always use perfect form. Always use a full range of motion, and don’t use momentum. Your muscles are supposed to do the work (this is true for every exercise, even a bicep curl).
- You know your body better than anyone. See a specialist if you face an injury like mine as soon as possible. I unfortunately wasted a year of my life experiencing this chronic pain.
This Experience Was One Of The Most Challenging Of My Life
Albert Einstein said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results”. I spun my wheels for over a year. Truth be told, I was going insane before I got my surgery.
Your health affects every aspect of your life; to be injured is to be in poor health. Injuries will make everything in your life harder. We don’t need that; life’s already hard enough.
The Big Problem With Fitness Culture
Many people, especially guys, want to be as big and strong as physically possible. They’re constantly drip-fed images of bodybuilders on their Instagram feeds, which undoubtedly makes men feel inferior to “fitness influencers” regarding physique and strength.
What happens (or what happened to me)? I would compare myself to these guys and try to get as big and strong as possible (it’s not possible for a natural weightlifter to get as big and strong as these “fitness influencers” who take steroids).
This led me to ignore my health and, instead, to lift as much weight as possible.
I’d slam down 4000 calories daily when bulking and “go hard or go home” at the gym (I’m surprised I didn’t experience more injuries, especially when I first started going to the gym).
I’m among the lucky ones.
I hear shocking stories about gym culture on social media (predominantly YouTube). People are dying in the name of strength training.
Firstly, you have the bodybuilders on steroids who are so big their hearts literally can’t handle pumping the blood around their bodies, and then these guys prematurely die of heart attacks.
If you haven’t heard what happened to Justyn Vicky, he died doing heavy back squats ( warning: this video is deeply distressing). He was only 33 when he died. That’s no age, and the whole situation is deeply tragic.
It’s worth noting that Kristina Schmidt a 24-year-old personal trainer snapped her hip in half after doing heavy hip thrusts. She had to have surgery and, unfortunately, after surgery, got a bacterial infection, which was life-threatening.
Gabriel McKenna-Lieschke from Adelaide, Australia, was performing bicep curls with a 50kg weight and tore his bicep, resulting in him needing surgery, which then caused complications and his forearm required to be amputated.
Scott Murray, who developed an eating disorder around his fitness routine, took it so far that he eventually died of heart failure; Scott Was unfortunately only in his 20s when he passed away.
When Did Becoming Healthy Get So Unhealthy
The goal of strength training shouldn’t be to lift as much weight as possible; it should be to consistently keep your joints, bones, tendons and ligaments strong for the rest of your life.
In short, you need to become a lifter, which can only be achieved by consistently going to the gym. I recommend going around 3 times per week.
To become a lifter, you need to be consistent. You can’t become consistent if you’re injured. So, the one thing we need to avoid when strength training is injury.
How Do You Know When The Weights Are Too Heavy?
- When you can’t perform a full range of motion for the exercise.
- If you start using momentum when the weight gets heavy. You need to use your muscles, not momentum.
- When your form breaks down, for example, your back rounding when deadlifting or squatting or your shoulders rolling forward in the bench press.
- When you literally couldn’t have completed another rep with good form. Leave two reps in reserve (stop the set when you feel you could have done an extra two reps with perfect form) at the end of every set. Perform all reps flawlessly.
The Bottom Line
Please take what you can from my injury experience, warm up properly, don’t lift too heavy too soon, and always use the full range of motion. Your main goal in strength training (even more critical than getting stronger) is not to get injured. If you get hurt, your whole life will change for the worse. Life is too short to be in pain for a year like I was. Please listen to what I’m saying here. I would hate for you to go through a similar experience. Also, remove yourself from the toxicity of fitness culture if you can. I know removing myself from social media helped me. People are killing themselves in the name of “gains”. Health should always be the top priority. If anything you do compromises your health, you’re doing the wrong thing.
The first picture at the top of the article is me before going into theater for surgery in my hospital gown.
The second picture is a couple of days after surgery. As you can see, I’m wearing a plaster cast.
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