I pulled the rhomboid muscles in my back.
Here’s why: I created a daily warm up routine that included foam rolling and light stretching for essentially just my lower body.
Which, historically speaking for me, hasn’t lead to any issues and has worked out great. Especially for leg day and my martial arts training (which is pretty much leg day every time).
However, I can now see what the heavy lower body focus lead to… a lack of upper body focus.
…I haven’t been properly warming up the upper body muscles I’m using to do heavy lifting which, of course, is what lead to this injury.
So, I’ve since updated my warm up routine to be more balanced and specific to the muscle groups being utilized that day (duh moment). And I’m creatively modifying my workouts until my rhomboid injury heals.
Generally speaking, most of us operate with a “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” kind of mentality.
Exercise related injuries, oftentimes, are an illustration that something is “broke.”
…But many of us don’t see this.
We do what we need to do to get healed and then go back to doing exactly what we were doing before—assuming it was a freak accident or some kind of “dumb luck.”
I’d argue that it’s almost always more than that…. that it’s your body’s attempt to communicate with you that something is wrong… that something isn’t being stretched, strengthened, or otherwise cared for enough.
Take a close look at what could have lead to the injury and modify your routine to include the proactive solution so it doesn’t happen the next time.
…This is experiential learning at its finest.