What is an Injury?
If you're human, you've been injured.
Unless you’re the luckiest person alive (in which case, congrats!), you’ve experienced injury symptoms—pain, stiffness, weakness. These symptoms often guide us to recognize an injury, especially after a clear cause like a misstep or overdoing it at the gym.
Once injured, everyone seems to have a theory about why it happened: posture, poor lifting form, fatigue, muscle imbalances, or just being unprepared for the activity. Some of these explanations hold water, but we’ll untangle that in another email.
For now, let’s focus on a key question: What is an injury, really?
The Basics of Injury
An injury occurs when a force applied to a tissue (muscle, tendon, ligament, bone, etc.) exceeds that tissue’s capacity, causing damage. This damage could be:
A muscle tear (ranging from small to severe)
A tendon losing stiffness
A bone fracture
Cartilage tears
Sometimes, this damage results in pain—but not always. And not all pain means injury. Keep that nugget of wisdom in your back pocket for later!
Two Roads to Damage: Macro vs. Micro
Macrodamage
Traumatic, obvious, “oh no” moments: twisting your ankle, falling off a ladder, or taking a bad hit in sports.
These injuries stem from abnormal forces far beyond what your tissues can handle.
Accumulated Microdamage
The sneaky, slow-burn type most of us encounter: tendon issues, lower back pain, plantar fasciitis, etc.
These result from repetitive stress—like doing too much too soon or not giving your body enough time to recover between workouts.
Here’s the kicker: Stress isn’t inherently bad! It’s how we get stronger, build endurance, and improve health. The problem arises when we don’t allow enough recovery between stress exposures, leading to that gradual accumulation of microdamage.
Stay tuned! Next time, we’ll explore the fascinating (and sometimes confusing) relationship between injury and pain, how to assess and recover from training, how posture influences injury risk, and methods of reducing risk for injury.
Does Pain = Injury? Does Injury = Pain?
At Ascension, we prioritize helping you understand pain, especially its relationship to injury. Today, let’s explore the factors that influence this relationship and uncover how pain doesn’t always mean injury—and vice versa.
