Don’t Wait Until It Hurts

My shoulder has been bothering me for a few weeks. I hurt it doing an exercise in CrossFit, and it hasn’t gotten better yet. After trying to deal with it myself for a while, I finally talked to my coach about it, who gave me some rehab exercises to do.

Part of the issue is that I don’t have very good shoulder mobility. Because my shoulders are tight and not very flexible, I am more prone to tweaks and injuries. It kind of sucks.

Once I had my shoulder injury and couldn’t do the things I wanted to do in the gym, I stopped myself and sought help from someone more knowledgeable than myself. After I got hurt, my shoulder became top priority, and I started to do exercises every day to increase my shoulder mobility. And little by little, it’s improving. But it has been a frustrating process.

Here’s the thing: My shoulder mobility has been a problem for a long time. I have known about it, but improving my mobility wasn’t a priority for me because I wasn’t injured. I only started to work on my shoulder mobility AFTER it started to hurt.

I think this is a pretty common problem for a lot of us. We only deal with things when they hurt. We only address issues and problems in our lives when the level of pain gets really high. But once it gets to that point, it can be difficult to find a solution that works. If there is a solution, sometimes it takes a while to fix our problem.

If, on the other hand, we focus on prevention and make our health and well-being a priority every day, we are in a better position. If I had recognized my shoulder mobility was a problem and began to work on it, I might not have gotten hurt in the first place. In the same way, if we make our health and well-being a priority (even when we are doing okay), we can save ourselves from a lot of pain and heartache in our lives.

The key is to evaluate how you are doing on a regular basis. One exercise I love to do is to do a quick self-evaluation using the acronym SPIES. I try to identify one thing to work on in each area of my life, and put together a plan for improvement. Don’t wait until it hurts.