Injuries. Learn to work with them. And learn how to avoid them

If you got injured while training, chances are you screwed up. Sorry. I know no one wants to hear they’re at fault these days but more often than not it's the truth.
Pre-existing injuries or imbalances aside, exercises don’t cause injuries. Doing them wrong does.
Deadlifts aren’t bad for your back. Doing them wrong is.
Squats aren’t bad for your knees. Doing them wrong is.
I tore my bicep doing a dumbbell preacher curl. I had my arm on a funny angle. I even knew it was on a funny angle and should have stopped and fixed it. But I didn’t. As a result when I lowered the dumbbell my bicep went pop. My fault. Not the exercise.
It also isn’t always a weight issue. The preacher curl was a warm-up with less than half the weight I was going to use for my first work set. Which was about 50% of what my max would have been.
I needed a shoulder reconstruction last year after tearing my infraspinatus while bench pressing. It was 150kg. Was it too heavy? No. I’d benched that the week prior just fine and many times before that. Even when the injury happened it wasn’t that I was greatly struggling. I screwed up again that’s all. The bar came out too far and caused a nasty rotation of my shoulder and it went pop. Again, my fault.
Not the exercise.
A client recently hurt his back leg pressing at his gym. “Leg pressing?” I hear you ask. “How did he hurt it leg pressing? You don’t use your back on a leg press.”
Well, you’re not supposed to and technically you don’t, but if you go too low on a leg press and allow your hips to roll up off the seat all the pressure and weight transfer from your legs into your lower back. As strong as our spines are, they weren’t quite designed to be at sharp angles with hundreds of kilos compressing them. So things tend to go pop.
Upon hearing of his injury I knew instantly what he’d done. He wasn’t pulling himself into the seat enough and had taken the weight too low. His hips lifted and rolled and his back screamed “F you!”
It’s not serious most of the time. It needs icing for a few days. Ideally, you have a decent chiro who can give you a back adjustment and some massage to loosen the muscles up. Then it’s just a week or 2 off from leg press and any heavy or big back movements. No need to stop training for several weeks. You can still train your chest, shoulders, and arms. Personally, I would even lightly train my back with pulldowns and cable rows to keep blood in the area and promote healing.
What you don’t need to do, which is what 90% of quack physios recommend, is go and start doing all kinds of other exercises and activities to strengthen core and stabiliser muscles. You don’t need rehab work. You don’t need to take up pilates or yoga and work on your flexibility. You don't need to contort your body into kama sutra poses in order to activate frivolous muscles. And as I said earlier, you definitely don’t stop training!
In his messages to me, the client said, “I need to do some rehab work and get things to an acceptable level where I'm not continually injuring myself.”
There is nothing wrong with you. Your stabilisers and core are perfectly fine. You screwed up, that’s all. You made a mistake and got punished for it.
You don’t go from deadlifting 200kg every week for 6 months perfectly fine to suddenly not having the core and back strength to pick it up this week. You may not get the reps but you didn’t become so weak in 7-10 days that your body suddenly broke.
The issue isn't stemming from a deep-seated traumatic childhood experience that decided to rear its ugly head on rep 6 of a 10 rep set 30 years later.
I tell all my external and online clients to film their lifts and send them to me.
The reason I film my own training isn’t to post it on social media. It’s actually to see how I’m doing the exercise. In the heat of the moment when you’re being crushed by the weight, everything is horrible. Everything feels horrible. Your brain is telling you you’re about to die and you need to stop. Everything you know flies out the window. This causes most people to lose all concentration and do something wrong which can lead to things not moving right, being harder than they should, or worst case, getting injured.
Looking back over those vids normally shows 2 things. 1: what you thought were the ugliest, most hideous reps were actually pretty normal. Maybe they got a bit ugly towards the end of the set but that's what happens when you get tired. What's going on inside your brain during a set and what's happening in the real world are normally very different. 2: It allows me to see what needs to be changed for myself and a client. Most of the time it’s a very simple tweak. Move your elbow here. Pull the bar in this direction. Try placing your feet here. Take it to this depth, not where you’re going to.
A tiny adjustment can make all the difference. Because it’s that tiny adjustment in the other direction that probably caused the injury.
Injuries. Sometimes shit just goes wrong, but most of the time, we did something wrong. Learn from your mistakes by watching film of your training. Hire a coach who really knows how to train and knows what to look for and use their knowledge. Show them your training and pick their brain on how to fix things so you stop getting injured. It works for professional athletes in other sports. It will work for you too.
Remember, exercises don’t cause injuries. Doing them wrong does.