Cillian O'Connor Strength and Conditioning

Sometimes there is a clear biomechanical reason for your pain.

If you throw 100kg more than you’ve ever lifted onto the bar and your back hurts afterwards, there’s likely a strong biomechanical aspect to your pain.

But most aches and pains we pick up aren’t really as clear cut as that.

Often we can’t point to one specific event that was the start of things.

We just slowly had symptoms build until one day we noticed ‘this actually hurts’.

Managing your training load and technique can be a part of treating that.

But there can also be a need to address other things in that process like your beliefs about what that pain means, as well as outside stressors that might be making recovery harder than it needs to be.

Ultimately taking a more nuanced view on pain and injury is actually about giving yourself more tools to help yourself get to where you want to be.

Few things are as frustrating as picking up an injury when it feels like you didn’t deserve it.

Your technique was good and you weren’t lifting anything heavier than usual.

So did the lifting gods just decide to fck you up for no reason?

Many times when this happens, we can actually identify a lot of other stressors outside training that were probably detracting from our recovery.

The late nights, higher work stress, poor nutrition, the bill you didn’t expect to get.

Each one might not be that bad.

But they can accumulate until our bucket is full, and now a weight that would usually be easy is actually enough to exceed our capacity.

Injury sucks, but it is perhaps the greatest teacher for helping us learn how to do things better.

Sometimes we get bad luck, but sometimes it’s an opportunity to see where we could help our body out by working on some non training stuff that’s taking a toll.

This video is an excerpt from my interview on ‘s Strong For Life Blueprint podcast. Check out his most recent episode 140 for my in depth chat with him about back pain and my own back pain story.

Why should personal trainers learn about pain and injury management?

Because it’s a huge part of our job.

Everyone you train is going to get hurt eventually.

When that happens, you will either be equipped to help them or not.

Sometimes that means you take the wheel and get them back to health with training.

Other times you need to be able to recognise when you’re outside your scope of knowledge refer out.

But the vast majority of low level aches and pains people come to you with? You should feel very confident in being able to have a significant positive impact on them by using some very simple strategies.

If not, it’s time to upskill!

Biomechanics can be a very useful tool for helping us rehab.

A lot of the time just reducing weight on an exercise works.

But sometimes, we can benefit from also just temporarily changing the movement so that it’s putting less demands on the injured or painful tissue.

This example of shifting to a more hip dominant squat to treat knee pain is just one example.

You could take a wider grip in your bench to help elbow pain, arch your back / flex more on deadlifts to help your back, change from a pronated to a neutral grip to help your shoulder etc.

The key is understanding that these are not inherently ‘safer’ movements. They’re just tools that are helping you calm things down before building back your capacity to do a wider variety of movement.

The exercise is rarely the issue. Generally the load you are using matters much more.

Mind blowing when you realise your spine isn’t made of glass

I spent years struggling with shoulder pain.

I did thousands of band pull aparts, external rotations, rows etc.

All the stuff that’s meant to work.

I had all kinds of different painful manual therapies done.

I also had cortisone injected into my shoulder twice.

Everyone had a different theory about what was going on and a different method that was supposed to be the real fix.

Ultimately, I ended up taking things into my own hands.

I learned about pain science and load management.

I took the exercises I wanted to do and found a light entry point on them.

I gradually progressed the load at pace with what my shoulder seemed able for.

My shoulders felt better and more resilient than ever.

When I encountered a new movement that caused pain (behind the neck pressing for example) I would just take the same approach.

Start light, progress slowly.

At first that meant a 5kg training bar. A few months later I could behind the neck press 40 kilos and my shoulders felt great.

You’re capable of more than you think if you just stick to smart principles.

Struggling with shoulder pain? Shoot me a message to discuss

There’s a time for using very light exercise in rehab.

But for too many people, it never progresses beyond that.

Their experience of the rehab process is that they go to see someone who doesn’t really know what strength training is, or worse, they actively advise against doing it.

Good rehab should be gradually progressing the volume and intensity of the exercises to get you back to lifting heavy and living athletically without pain getting in the way.

If you want to finally get hands on help from someone who knows lifting and how to guide you through the rehab process, DM me the word ‘REHAB’ to have a chat about what that could look like for you.