- Experiencing the world and different activities. If you never try anything new, it will be impossible to find what you enjoy.
- Going out of your comfort zone. I recently flew to Rome, a place I’ve always wanted to go to, and I went solo. It helped me build so much confidence in myself.
- Eating healthily and working out. True happiness is being in impeccable health.
- Reading. When you read, you learn about some of the most interesting people who have graced this earth. It’s safe to say we can learn how to be happy from exceptional people. My favourite books are Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, Principles by Ray Dalio and Benjamin Franklin’s Biography, An American Life. They taught me and helped me look at life through a different paradigm.
- Happiness is in doing things, not achieving things. For example, I love to read and write. No matter how many people read my posts or books I read, I love reading and writing, so I’ll continuously pursue them for their own sake.
- Don’t smoke, overdrink or do drugs. Never let anything or anyone overly infiltrate and compromise your mind. It’s all you have. I’ve done some of the most stupid and regretful things when I’ve been drunk.
- Engage in hobbies. We all like different things; experiment with hobbies, and you’ll eventually find hobbies you enjoy. Having activities we regularly do that we enjoy makes us happier.
- Get 8 hours of deep, quality sleep every night. This is the most underrated tip of all time.
- Change how you view negative situations and stressors. We can’t be happy all the time. Negative emotions serve a purpose; they help us avoid situations that we shouldn’t get involved in, and they’re just as important as positive emotions. For example, in poetry, writing, and music, some of the best artistic endeavours have come from a place of melancholic emotions. Art wouldn’t be so beautiful if only filled with positive emotions and fake smiles.
- Socialise. There’s no better sense of happiness than laughing with friends and family.
- Direct your life to some overall meaning. Whether that’s the goal of being an artist, a police officer, or a doctor, whatever it is, having something you’re aiming for in your life helps you get through the bad times because he who has a reason to live can get through any how.
Tag: Health
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What’s The Secret To Happiness ( 11 Things That Help)
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How To Turn Your Life Around When It’s Going No Where
Unemployed?
Apply for jobs, no matter how beneath you they may seem. ( I used to be a pot washer for KFC.) You need to start somewhere.
Broke?
When you get your entry-level job, save at least 10% of your income every month until you have three months’ worth of income. This works well as a safety fund, which will support you if anything bad happens and you need to pay out sudden expenses. Once you have your safety fund, I’d start investing in the stock market, i.e., the S&P 500.
Miserable?
Start engaging in hobbies and activities that you enjoy for their own sake. I like reading, going on walks, playing chess, watching football, TV series, and films, and working out. You won’t have time to feel miserable when you’re engaged in activities you enjoy for their own sake.
Balding?
Join the club (the below picture shows my receding hairline).
Like many men I’ve faced this problem : it’s best to either shave your head, i.e., get a buzz cut, or get a hair transplant. Pick one. I don’t care enough about my hair to get a hair transplant; I’d rather put that money towards investments or a holiday.
Living with parents?
Use it to your advantage to try to climb the ladder in your entry-level role (even in jobs like working at Kentucky Fried Chicken KFC, you can earn a decent salary by climbing up the ladder), and eventually, you’ll earn enough money to rent your own place or maybe even buy your own house. While you’re living with your parents, you can save more, so make the most out of it.
Friendless?
Join meetup groups (ie meet up.com), and you’ll be able to meet like-minded people.
Pursue hobbies which will help you meet people who are interested in similar things to you. There are even apps where you can make friends. You could also reach out to some colleagues (when you get your job) or some old friends to rekindle old friendships.
Depressed and miserable?
Again, focus your energies on activities you enjoy. It’s almost impossible to feel depressed when you’re doing something you enjoy. If you feel miserable, maybe journal down why you feel that way. You may be able to untangle your mind on paper and find the root cause of your unhappiness. Once you know the root cause, you can take steps to become happier.
You can definitely turn your life around.
Many other people have.
So, if another human can do it.
So can you.
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16 Things You Learn As You Get Older
- No one gives a fuck what you do. So, make decisions for you.
- Hangovers aren’t worth it.
- Health is wealth.
- Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.
- You need to accept reality as it is rather than as you want it to be.
- Do the best with what you’ve got where you are.
- Comparison will steal your joy.
- If you get better one day at a time, you can eventually become the person you want to become.
- Sometimes, you need to part ways with people who aren’t good for you.
- Travel when you’re young. Don’t put it off until you’re retired; do it when you look and feel the best.
- Make time for what you enjoy. It’s the ultimate coping mechanism.
- Money isn’t everything, but it certainly helps you live more comfortably.
- Porn isn’t worth it. Life is better without porn.
- Spend time with your parents. They aren’t getting any younger.
- Be careful who you choose as your spouse. Choosing the wrong partner is a death sentence.
- Find ways to relax. It’s one of the most important things.
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How To Become Extraordinary (Do What The Extraordinary Do)
- Avoid doing what 99% of the population is doing. If you do the same as normal people, you get normal results.
- Get in the best shape possible, lift weights 3 times per week, eat healthily, get enough sleep, get stronger, et cetera. Wherever your body goes, your mind will follow. If you get in great physical shape, you are more likely to feel better mentality. Health is everything.
- Practice positive habits. I’ll give my example. These are the habits I try my best to stick to every day: I read, write, work out, go for a walk, tidy my house and meditate. You have everything to gain by following these habits and nothing to lose. Swap bad habits for good ones. To become extraordinary, we must win today and try to win every other day for the rest of our lives; if we do, we might become extraordinary. All we can do is the work, and that’s required every day.
- Get up early. Part of winning the day is winning the morning, so getting up early at 6 a.m. is usually best. I’m fully aware that people are on different work shifts, and so am I, so I replace getting up early with getting up several hours before my shift so I can work on myself.
- Read: to become extraordinary, we must determine what extraordinary means. We can only discover this by following our curiosities and becoming more erudite. Reading helps us find out what we want. The more you know, the more you can do, and the more you can do, the more opportunities you have to succeed.
- Read about extraordinary people and associate with exceptional people. By learning about the lives of the extraordinary, we can gain road maps for becoming extraordinary in our own lives. You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with, so if you are friends with exceptional people, there is a good chance you’ll be extraordinary yourself.
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How To Dramatically Improve Your Life
It’s all about habits. If we can dramatically improve our habits, we can dramatically improve our lives.
If you practice the following habits you’ll realise you have everything to gain by doing them and nothing to lose.
- Work out 3 times per week– this will strengthen your body and mind and dramatically improve your confidence, where the body goes, the mind will follow. Getting fit will also make you more productive and effective in all areas of your life. Health is wealth, and life isn’t about fitness, but fitness dramatically improves your life. It also teaches you that to get better at something is to get better at anything. If you can dramatically change how your body looks and feels for the better, you might just be able to change your life.
- Read 30 minutes per day. The world is overwhelmingly complex, and reading literature helps us make some sense of it all. Reading is also a highly satisfying activity. It’s relaxing and improves your vocabulary and communication skills.
- Follow whatever dream you have and see where it takes you if you stick to it for 2 years– I don’t know what your ambition in life is; maybe you don’t know. But if you can start doing that thing for 30 minutes to an hour every day, the results compound over time miraculously. I enjoy writing, so I’m spending 30 minutes to an hour per day writing. Although I don’t get paid for this, writing is a deeply satisfying creative outlet for me. Find your thing. And if you can’t find it, then try a few things until you stumble upon it.
- Save and invest – here’s an example of how effective investing can be. Say you earn £2000 per month and invest 10% per month of this (£200) in the S&P 500 index fund ( the top 500 companies in America) then this, on average, has a 10–12% return of interest. So if you started investing now, then in 30 years, you’d have almost £500,000. Which is a sizable nest egg. In the next 2 years, if you learn this vital habit, it will set you up for life. Ideally, you’d invest more.
- Meditation – I recently watched a video with Billionaire Ray Dalio and film producer Martin Scorsese, and they both discuss how beneficial meditation has been in their lives. Ray Dalio says it’s the greatest gift he could give anyone. Meditation helps you maintain a state of equanimity and balance. So that you can make better decisions in life (and under pressure), it helps you get in touch with your subconscious mind, which is where creativity comes from and a lot of your wants, desires, dislikes, etc. come from; if we can get in touch with our unconscious, we can win at life. Meditation is extremely effective.
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What To Do When Nothing Goes Your Way
Focus on improving all areas of your life.
I’ve started working out three times a week (doing full-body workouts )and going on daily walks. I get 80–90% of my calories from whole foods. I’m also staying hydrated and prioritising getting good sleep every night ( 8 hours is best).
Intellectual goals- I’m trying to improve my intellect so that I know more and can do more. When we know more and can do more, we’re more useful in general. Nothing bad can occur from improving your mind.
Spiritual goals: I’ve started a meditation practice where I meditate 2 x 20 minutes per day focusing on my breathing. It’s helping me become more calm, patient and I’m getting less caught up in my mind.
Monetary goals: I always try to take on more responsibility in my day job. This builds my skills and helps develop my character. Doing difficult things is great for us; I also save and invest 20% of my income each month, which will hopefully give me financial freedom in the long run.
Even when trying to be the best version of yourself, you’ll experience setbacks. They’re part of life.
Just like you get hot and cold days, realise you get good and bad days, and they’re both sides of the same coin. Realise that this moment will pass, and the further you go through a bad patch, the closer you are to the good times.
Try not to let the bad times affect you too much, and the same for the good times. They’re both part of life.
Another strategy to make you feel better is to, direct your energies toward something you enjoy, i.e. a hobby.
This will help you through those dark times in your life because most people experience enjoyment when they engage in hobbies. When we experience joy, we tend not to think about things that are not going well in our lives.
We all experience bad times, and just knowing this fact doesn’t make it any easier, but just hold in there, and you’ll get through it.
I like this analogy:
“To be like the rock that the waves keep crashing over. It stands unmoved and the raging of the sea falls still around it.” – Marcus Aurelius.
We need to be like this when life gives us its worst.
Undefeatable.
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Some Of The Best Night Time Habits (And What Not To Do)
- You should sleep roughly the same time every night, give or take an hour. For example, if you go to bed at 10 or 11 p.m., you should get up at 6 or 7 a.m.
- Wind down with a book or something else, such as a board game or even tidying your house, so you won’t be staring at screens before bed ( the bright light from screens keeps you awake).
- Having a warm shower will relax your muscles and mind, helping you have a restful sleep.
- Do not eat too close to going to bed. Try not to eat for 1 or 2 hours before going to bed. No one likes going to bed bloated.
- Don’t drink lots of water before bed. Stop drinking an hour before bed so that you won’t wake up like an old man to pee at 3 a.m. in the morning. Try to get most of your water intake during the day and evening so you’re well-hydrated before bed don’t chug all your water intake at night
- Don’t drink alcohol before bed. Or at least limit the amount you drink. It’s known alcohol makes you fall asleep faster, but the overall quality of your sleep is much worse, and you wake more frequently. Alcohol also dehydrates you, and this can diminish your sleep quality.
- Don’t exercise too late at night. Ideally, try working out in the morning or afternoon. If you must, work out in the evening, but not one or two hours before bed. Otherwise, your adrenaline will be high, negatively impacting your ability to fall asleep. When I work out at night, I find it very hard to sleep.
- Don’t drink caffeine before bed. Try to drink all your caffeine as early in the day as possible. I try not to drink caffeine after noon. This means that by the time I lay down to rest, the caffeine is out of my system.
- Don’t smoke before bed. Nicotine, like caffeine, is a stimulant and will keep you up at night.
- Write down five things you’re grateful for and tick off your to-do list. There’s no better and more comforting feeling than completing your goals for the day. It’s the only way to get to our idealised selves, and we can only do it one day at a time. Being grateful for the small things is a cheat code to life, you instantly become happy.
- Brushing your teeth, this is a no-brainer.
- Clean your kitchen. I hate going to bed knowing I’ve forgotten to do my dishes or spray down the surfaces. For me, going to bed with a clean kitchen means going to bed with a clean mind.
- One easy hack is to use lamps at night on their lowest possible setting rather than have your main lights on. Your body prefers a dark environment at night as you get closer to bed time due to your circadian rythm (natural body clock). The picture below is me now in a darkish environment winding down for bed.
The Importance Of Good Sleep Hygiene And night Time Habits
If you follow the above advice, it should help massively. I know it has helped me a lot.
Good sleep hygiene and nighttime habits are vital for living a happy, enjoyable life.
We spend about one-third of our lives sleeping, or about 26 years. This is equivalent to 227,916 hours.
Just like we need to get our wakefulness right, we need to get our sleep right.
We always focus on:
I must do this; I must do that.
I’ll go here.
I’ll go there.
But how many of us stop and think:
How can I improve my sleep routine?
Unfortunately, not many of us do.
And if you ask yourself that question.
Great, you’ve taken the first step.
Now, focus on the advice above and get to work.
Some Additional Helpful Habits
- Get a massage from your spouse or give him/her one. It feels great to get a massage, and it feels great to give someone else one. We humans are givers; we generally feel good knowing that we’re helping someone else feel good.
- Listen to classical or calming music. This will relax your body and mind.
- Light a candle; pleasant smells can help relax and calm us.
- Do some deep, slow breathing. This will slow your heart rate and trigger your parasympathetic nervous system, which is the rest and digest nervous system rather than the fight-and-flight one. This is extremely relaxing.
- Meditation is another way to relax your body and mind. It helps prevent you from getting lost in your thoughts and instead immerses you in the present moment, which is deeply satisfying. To meditate, you can either focus on your breath for 5-10 minutes while sitting in a cross-legged position with your eyes closed or take the same posture and repeat a mantra for 5 minutes, e.g., “Ohm” (this type of meditation is called transcendental meditation).
Good nighttime habits enable us to sleep at a time we like so we can get up early and seize the day.
Benjamin Franklin said “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise”.
And I believe him.
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How To Not Get Injured Lifting Weights (My Experience And The Toxicity Of Fitness Culture)
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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How To Not Get Injured Lifting Weights
Over the past year, I’ve suffered from a chronic wrist injury from lifting weights. In this article, I want to use my experience as a springboard to ensure you know how to not get injured lifting weights.
This is my story.
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.
Noting 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.
How To Not Get Injured Lifting Weights – Don’t Get Injured In The First Place
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.
How To Not Get Injured Lifting Weights – 5 Steps For Injury Prevention
- 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.
And that’s why I’m writing this article to ensure you know how to not get injured lifting weights.
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 On How To Not Get Injured Lifting Weights
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.I hope this article helps you going forward and that you can learn from my experience on how to not get injured lifting weights.
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