Starting Strength

bony fractures are extremely rare weight room events. If pain occurs immediately in response to a movement done during training, it should be assumed to be an injury and should be treated as such. Chronic injury is usually an inflammatory response to the overuse of a joint or its associated connective issue due to poor technique or excessive training volume. Tendinitis and bursitis are common diagnoses and are usually the result of repeated exposures to maladaptive stress. It is extremely important to develop the ability to distinguish between injury pain and normal soreness, since your health and long-term progress depend on it.
     
    When you return to training after some time off, you must consider your de-trained condition. Depending on the duration of the layoff, different approaches are taken. If you have missed just a few workouts (fewer than five or six), repeat the last workout you did before the layoff. You should be able to do this, although it may be hard. This approach results in less progress lost than if significant backing-off is done, and the following workout can usually be done in the order it would have been had the layoff not occurred.
     
    If the layoff has been a long one, a couple of months or more, take care when planning your first workout back. If you have been training with weights for long enough to get very strong, adaptations have occurred in more than just your muscles. The neuromuscular system – the nervous system and its interface with the muscles – has adapted to training by becoming able to recruit motor units more efficiently, and it is slower to detrain than are the muscles it innervates. It remembers how to lift heavy weights even if the muscles are out of shape. This neuromuscular efficiency is quite useful when you are in shape, but when you are de-trained, it allows you to lift more than you are actually in condition to do without incurring adverse effects. Spectacular soreness, as mentioned earlier, will always be the result unless you use restraint in determining your volume and intensity. Hubris, not heroism, is demonstrated when a guy comes back after a year’s layoff and tries to repeat his PRs that day. Unless you have absolutely nothing else important to do for several days afterward, please exercise good judgment when doing your first workout back in the gym.
    Barbell Training for Kids
     
    A whole lot of people are under the erroneous impression that weight training is harmful for younger athletes, specifically the pre-pubescent population. Pediatricians are a wonderful group of folks as a whole, but very often they are woefully uninformed regarding the data pertaining to the injury rates of various sports activities. They may also be reluctant to apply some basic logic to an analysis of those numbers.
    Table 8-2 lists the injury rates of various sports. Note that organized weightlifting activities, at 0.0012 injuries per 100 participation hours, is about 5100 times safer than everyone’s favorite organized children’s sport, soccer, at 6.2 injuries per 100 player hours. Gym class, at 0.18, is more dangerous than supervised weight training. Yet it is still common for medical professionals to advise against weight training for kids. The most cursory glance at the actual data renders this recommendation foolishness.

    Table 8-2. Injury rates per 100 participation hours in various sports. From Hamill, B. “Relative Safety of Weightlifting and Weight Training,” Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research 8(1):53-57, 1994.

    So why does this mythology persist, and how did it get started? Most often cited as the primary concern is the chance of epiphyseal fracture that damages the growth plate, leading to growth asymmetry in the affected appendage. The entire body of the sports medicine literature contains six reports of growth-plate fractures that occurred in kids and were associated with weight training; none of these reports were detailed enough to determine whether the injury occurred under the bar (or if there even was a bar), occurred as the result of a fall due to faulty technique or improper instruction, or occurred as the result of injudicious loading. And even in these six isolated examples, none of the kids subsequently displayed any long-term effects that would indicate that a growth-plate injury does not heal just like any other injury. You know this yourself because fractures involving joints are common in kids, and the world is not crawling with