How to Avoid Surgery and Get Back to Living the Life You Want to Live

You injured yourself. This time it’s actually pretty bad. You go to the doctor they tell you to try rehab, but you will likely need surgery. But, you don’t want surgery because you still want to do the things you love to do. Whether that be Jiu-Jitsu, Weightlifting, fishing, etc. Surgery will take away a lot of time from doing these things and in the extreme cases sometimes it will prevent you from ever doing them again. You politely tell the doctor to fuck off. But, what’s next?
After I left high school people told me the new wrestling coach power cleaned 300lbs while having no functioning ACL’s. I personally rehabbed someone back from an ACL tear in the gym without having surgery. Many athletes perform at the highest levels while having a crucial ligament torn. You don’t NEED to get surgery to function.
How we train in the gym following an injury can be crucial in the rehab process and long-term development of an athlete/client.
There are two crucial variables that I think heavily determine how effective your rehab process is. That is load management and exercise selection.
The site of an injury is fairly sensitive to load. A 30lbs dumbbell now “aggravates” the shoulder. It is appropriate to only use loads that the site of injury can tolerate and gradually increase the load so the site can gradually adapt to the stressor and send the biological resources necessary to grow “stronger.”
Secondly, exercise selection is crucial so as to not place any unnecessary load/force onto the site of injury. This is where a 1-arm cable lat pulldown might be a much better option after a shoulder injury than a pull-up because the pulldown you are getting nothing but muscular tension rather than stress on the joint/ligaments.
If you can really dial in these two variables I think you can have massive success in avoiding surgery and getting clients back to living the lives they want to live. The more experience you have the better you are going to be at this process.