Injury and Checking Your Premises

Injured individuals, I understand your pain. As a genuine empath, I do not aim to discredit the discomfort you may be experiencing and the decisions that stem from it. However, if you can separate yourself from the pain, I would like to engage in a logical discussion with you.

Many people who are injured, to some degree, find themselves trying to make sense of their situation. It’s a common human tendency. For instance, when you tear your MCL while playing basketball, your mind may automatically associate the injury with the sport. The logic is that if you didn’t play basketball, you wouldn’t have torn your MCL.

People take this logic into a number of things, including fitness. In order to break this logic, let’s check our premises. Let’s start with a very important premise:

You are built to function in the world.

With this premise, we tend to realize how silly it is to subscribe to logic that says, “Ah! I just have a bad back, so weights just aren’t for me.” Sure, you might have hurt your back a dozen times and, sure, you might have a horrible understanding of how to move, but you are fully capable of functioning in the world. In other words, it’s not about the weights. It’s about you.

When you begin to state a (false) truth about your injuries, check your premises. Respect your injuries, but the best approach is one of personal accountability. You might ask yourself, “what about this is my responsibility?” When you do that you keep yourself open to a world of possibility and earn yourself an opportunity to improve, neither of which are available with the alternative logic.

Logan Gelbrich

@functionalcoach