HEALING INJURIES WITH BODYWEIGHT TRAINING
By Ollie Chick
Back in the day, at 18, I was a competitive powerlifter. On the outside, I was “strong”. But internally, I knew his body was a wreck.
Yes I could deadlift over 600lbs, but I couldn’t do a pull-up, could barely run a mile, and I had the body of a 70-year-old - at 18! My knees creaked, my lower back hurt and my shoulders ground with every rotation. I was well and truly broken. Was I strong? You can be the judge.
I first got into powerlifting after being obese as a kid. Taken to the doctor multiple times for fat-related issues, always last in cross country, and bullied in school, I found hope in the gym - and really enjoyed the process. But now, I struggled with motivation after constant setbacks due to injury - the mere fact of not being able to walk his kids at 70 petrified him.
Enough was enough and I tried physio, sports massage, and even visited an osteopath. Nothing worked, and if anything I was even more broken, and now had to do a 30-minute warmup and 30 minutes of rehab a day to just about function!
I was a personal trainer at the time with a fully booked calendar. I preached “squat, bench, and deadlifts - that’s all you need!” but I was so broken that I knew there was nothing wrong going on.
A good friend of mine, a yogi, introduced me to calisthenics. I balked at the idea, seeing it as boring, easy, and with too much effort, but I was open to change. I knew that you either get better, or you get worse, there’s nothing in the middle. You keep doing what you’re doing and get the same results, or you make a change.
I started working on full range of motion, focusing on the shoulder and within weeks my shoulder pain went. This was due to working all the small muscles in the shoulder and correcting the imbalance between muscles pulling on my shoulder in the front and back of his upper body.
Next, the lower back pain went, as all the movements in calisthenics used the core, and this took all the pressure off the lower back.
Lastly, the knee pain went, admittedly, a few months down the line, once I incorporated deeper squats, full range of motion leg movements and weighted stretching. I was fixed - and it was all due to calisthenics.
These fixes can be summed up in 6 ways:
I gained a full range of motion in my body.
My body was moving the way it was meant to move.
All the small muscles in the body switched on and started working properly.
My ligaments and my tendons were activated and turned into steel rods.
My core got stronger, which took the pressure off all the joints around it, including the knees and shoulders (the body is far more interlinked than you think!!!)
I learned how to use the bigger muscles in my body, and the correct shoulder/pelvis positions for different movements.
It wasn’t just the injuries though. I tried bench pressing again after 9 months off of powerlifting, not touching a weight. My old PB was a 140kg bench press, and I came back and repped 140 for 3! My deadlift and squat had barely decreased, yet now I was injury free, more mobile and in the best physical shape of my life!
When I say calisthenics heals injuries and bulletproofs you, I’m talking from one of the scariest examples I know - my own story. Imagine if I kept going? What permanent damage could I have done to my body?
But it doesn’t stop there.
We have hundreds of stories of members who had pain before trying calisthenics, who had tried physios, chiropractors and weight training. Check them out by clicking the button below: