Lifting Weights Causes Injuries?

I was pulled into a frustrating conversation earlier this week and quite frankly, I’m still a little annoyed by it. A fit, gifted female client of mine had just completed a very intense workout requiring a great deal of relative body strength. We’re talking over 50 chin-ups, push-ups with her feet on a 36″ box, heavy kettlebell swings, the works. She rocked it out.

After a congratulations on a job well done we were hanging out and scheduling our next appointment when we were approached. There’s a guy at the gym who teaches martial arts and, though until now I’d not spoken to him, through observation I can see is fairly misguided in his approach to strength training. He rolled up to ask how long I’d been working with this particular client, and said that he’d seen her do a bunch of stuff on the BOSU ball and how impressive it was. Nothing about all of the stuff that she just did. Nope, the BOSU ball stuff.

My reply was “Yeah, I’ve been trying to break her of that shit”. This obviously was not what he was expecting and he sputtered a bit about how impressive her one-legged squats and rotations on the ball were and how he couldn’t do it. Admittedly, my second response of “who cares?” wasn’t the most educational or accommodating, but it at least did spark further conversation. He continued on about coordination and balance until I finally hit him with the old Jim Wendler quote (paraphrased): “Given a couple of weeks I can probably teach you to squat on a Swiss Ball…” <- He agreed with me at this point, then I continued the quote "But it'll take a lot longer to teach you how to squat 600 lbs".

His response: "True, but once you start adding weight you're just increasing your likelihood of injury".

Holy shit.

I shrugged and said that injuries happen, but I'm pretty sure that I'd much rather face a skilled BOSU-based athlete on the mat than a skilled and well strength-trained athlete.

Seriously, people. As much as I like to poke fun at the Stability Ball and BOSU training, it certainly does have its place. That place is mostly rehabilitation and recovery work. That's what those tools and their accompanying training protocols were designed for, and that's what they are for. Unless your goal is to do progressively more challenging balancing and coordination acts while looking like a seal, then they shouldn't hold a major place in your training protocol. Even then you would be better served developing a great deal of absolute strength through other means and then honing that strength on the balance tools.

We need to talk for a second about the transference of skills. The more complex a skill is, the less likely it is to transfer to other areas of athletic development. For example, a squat is a pretty basic skill (until you get to the point of being an advanced powerlifter, but we'll leave that for now). Your body is designed to squat and assuming your movement patterns are tuned up then you'll be a pretty natural squatter. By developing the magnitude of your squat (through external resistance) you will develop power and coordination in that movement. This directly translates to almost all athletic endeavors. There's also the functional hypertrophy that can go along with it, but we'll again ignore that for now.

Now let's look at a two-legged squat on the BOSU with some sort of medicine ball hand rotation. Assuming that there's no injury present what we're basically looking at is a very light squat with artificially narrow feet (unless you're very small and a BOSU is wide enough for you to have a normal squat stance on) with some degree of ankle, knee, and hip compensation. The first few sessions you try this there's a lot of stability work that goes on and it's fairly difficult. However, after a few sessions you'll find that most of the challenge is gone and you can perform this task fairly easily.

At this point you've reached a basic level of coordination, balance, and ability. How do you improve from there? Make the squat more complex? Sure, to a point. However, you'll find that after a short time you'll just become better at your one-legged Romanian Deadlifts-into-Squats-into-Push Presses. You won't become a faster runner, sharper kicker, or better wrestler.

However, add 100 pounds to your working squat weight while maintaining your current bodyweight and I guarantee you'll run faster, jump higher, kick faster, and escape from holds better.

The injury thing? I don't agree there, either. With proper programming and technique adding external resistance will develop your strength, mobility, and coordination to the point where you will IMPROVE your resistance to injury. Spending time on a ball is not going to give your tendons, ligaments, skeletal system, and muscles the necessary impetus to remodel and improve themselves. This development of your structure is what will protect you from injury, not some sort of balancing act.

The reason that many people get screwed up from weight training is because they lift too much weight too early in their training career with piss-poor form. Period. The reason that powerlifters and strongmen are always jacked up is because they are continually pushing their bodies with very heavy loads and straddling that line between strength and injury. That's the nature of their sport and what they have to do in order to improve. They know it and they accept it. A martial artist, to use the example of the gentleman I was speaking to, does not need to train at that level of intensity all of the time, and so with judicious use of external resistance will be far LESS likely to be injured while maximizing their ability.

Don't get sidetracked and swayed by stuff that's all sizzle and no steak, people. Don't spend your time looking for the magical exercise that is suddenly going to change your performance or your physique. Instead look for the quality that you need to develop and then go and find the means by which to develop that quality.

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