The BEST CrossFit Modifications to Help you Train Through Injury
The last thing that any CrossFit athlete wants to do is stop training for any period of time due to an injury. A close second-to-last is having to significantly scale back their WODs. It’s in the DNA of every serious CrossFit athlete to want to go 110% with every workout. It’s a kind of trial-by-fire therapy.
In many cases, however, putting one’s head down and operating at full intensity despite pain and/or injury is either not possible or not conducive to adequate recovery. As a general rule of thumb, if pain is greater than 2/10 with a movement, modification should be considered. If it is greater than 3-4/10, modification is highly advised. Thankfully, there are many viable CrossFit movement modifications available that are effective at reducing pain while still allowing for a high intensity workout. In this week’s blog, I will be going over categorical modifications, rather than specific exercise modifications, in order to maximize the applicability of the recommendations and help you adapt to whatever training injury comes your way.
Add Tempo Constraints
One such modification includes adding constraints, such as pauses, to the major barbell lifts for those who experience pain when lifting heavy. Adding a pause to each rep, such as at the bottom of the squat for example, will inherently limit the amount of weight that one can lift while continuing to support a high perceived intensity level during the lift. Additional constraints that allow for high perceived intensity while reducing weight include introducing tempo work and increasing volume.
Replace Gymnastics with Strength Variants
Another strategy to facilitate training through pain and injury is to replace gymnastics movements with slower variations. For rig kipping movements, this could be as simple as performing the same movement but without the kip, such as replacing toes to bar with a hanging leg raise or replacing kipping pull ups with the strict variant. Other plyometric movements such as box jumps can be replaced by vertical jumps, step ups, or even body weight squats while still achieving a similar physiological result. Decreasing the velocity of movement tends to decrease the amount of strain placed through the tendons and ligaments, which often makes these modifications easier to tolerate for injured athletes.
Reduce Movement Complexity
Similar to the velocity adjustments above, reducing movement complexity can help injured athletes control their movement more effectively and operate with greater caution. This could be as simple as regressing double unders to single unders or walking lunges to conventional lunges. It can also be useful in the context of olympic weightlifting. Simply regressing the snatch, clean, and jerk to their “power” variants, for example, is enough for many to allow them to perform these lifts with significantly less pain as a result of the simplification.
Reduce Weight and/or Volume
Finally, when all else fails, there is nothing wrong with simply reducing weight or volume in a WOD. Oftentimes CrossFit athletes feel like they are wasting their time if they aren’t pushing themselves to the max with weights, or will sometimes feel pressure to maintain high set/rep volumes in order to fit in with the rest of the class. Temporarily reducing weight or volume, however, is arguably the easiest way to continue training in the presence of pain and injury and allows one to adequately maintain their fitness and movement competence despite injury. It can help athletes bounce back faster once the pain is gone and helps to prevent worsening of pain that can be more likely when continuing to strive for Rx.
The bottom line is that there are many ways to get creative with your CrossFit training so that you are able to continue training even in the wake of pain and injury. Hitting Rx when healthy is a great metric to strive for, but if your end-goal of CrossFit is to improve your health, wellness, and fitness longevity, then occasional modifications will likely be necessary in order to play that long game effectively.
Are you ready to rehab from a CrossFit-related injury and come back stronger than you were before injury? Schedule a free phone consultation with the doctors at The PATH Rehab & Performance here.
Dr. Brooks Kenderdine
PT, DPT, CSCS, USAW-1
Co-owner | The PATH Rehab & performance
