February 2021 Monthly Running Challenge

rheddmobile wrote: »

Today’s run was challenging for an unexpected reason - yesterday I failed a squat, missed one of the safety bars when I tried to bail, and thoroughly stapled myself to the ground under one and a half times my weight! I’m not really hurt - I don’t lift that heavy and the one safety bar that I managed to catch kept the weight mostly off me, I was just pinned until I could scream loud enough for my husband to hear me in the next room - but I bruised and wrenched several parts of myself and it wasn’t pleasant.

So, little safety talk, in case anyone reading this lifts at home. Supposedly there are an average of seven errors leading up to any disaster. I wonder how many I can count in my situation. What did I do wrong and what should I have done instead? First of all, I know my home gym setup isn’t optimal. Like many of us during Covid I am making do, and my “weight room” is half of a walk in closet, with two separate portable racks instead of a proper squat rack. There’s no room to bail backwards as recommended for people lifting alone, and in any case once I started tacoing forwards I couldn’t have bailed backwards anyway. Also the racks are too close together which means I have to be careful not to pinch my fingers between the bar and the rack when setting the weight down. So, first error, unsafe setup.

Second error, not having my husband in the same room while I lifted. You can’t really spot a squat very well, but it would have been nice to have someone there immediately instead of a minute and a half later.

It’s a weight I regularly lift with no problems, so that wasn’t one of the issues. But just to note, don’t ego lift when alone.

Got off balance slightly to the front and when I started to fold, went down crooked. Need to work on my form, obviously! Error number three.

And what I think is error number four, had no idea what I was doing when trying to fail and hit the safety bars. I have actually never failed a squat in this type of rack before! I usually lift moderate at home to make it safer, and at the gym there’s a proper squat cage - if you fail the bar ends up on the cage bars, and you have to do the “crawl of shame” out from under, but there’s no possibility of the weight falling on you.

I think that’s it, four errors. A couple more, like lifting more weight or missing the bars completely or not having my husband anywhere in the house, and it could have been an actual disaster instead of just a bad scare.

So, the main thing I have learned from this is that when I am over being bruised, I am going to take a bar with light weight and PRACTICE failing, getting out from under the bar, and hitting the safety bars. This seems so obvious to me in retrospect but I have never read any advice to do it. So, if you have a home gym, and you lift alone, think about what you need to do on those potentially dangerous lifts such as a bench press and a squat, and then PRACTICE doing it so you know what it feels like when you need to do it for real.

My husband is also going to make sure he’s within earshot (he was using the blower on his 3d printer, which is loud, and couldn’t hear) whenever I’m doing squats from now on.

So, anyway, I smashed one hand between the bar and the rack, and bruised my fingers pretty good, hit one shin with the weights I think and gave myself a nice swollen bruise, and worst of all twisted one foot so my big toe and arch are sore. Managed to avoid pulling any muscles but all my muscles feel slightly tweaked from struggling. I was worried that the toe was sprained but although it was a little sore when running, it seems mostly okay. And the shin didn’t give me any trouble. Also my fingers feel much better after a night’s sleep and nothing seems broken. So yay!

Which is good because the weather today was glorious and it would have been a shame to have missed it! Ran 10k and the last mile felt like someone was draining my blood! Just bone tired. But got it done. And then enjoyed a lovely walk on the Greenline.