Last “big” injury I had was in 2011.
I’d been training about eighteen months and got it into my head that it’d be a great idea to enter a powerlifting meet (despite not being very strong or especially skilled in the squat, bench, and deadlift).
Anyway, it got to about a month out from the meet and my lifts were still not up to par. But instead of doing the smart thing and bowing out, I opted to double down on how hard I was training (when you should actually be doing pretty much the exact opposite that close to a competition).
The result?
One afternoon, when I was deadlifting, I felt a wet “thunk” in my hamstring.
Believe it or not, the moment of injury was completely painless. It wasn’t until about ten minutes later when the contents of my pelvis felt like they were going to spill out of my backside while I was doing good mornings that I knew something was rotten in the state of Denmark.
So I went home, slept, and woke up to a leg that wouldn’t move, and a back that felt as though daemons were rubbing shards of glass coated in salt and lemon juice directly into my spinal cord.
It was not fun at all.
And, no, I didn’t compete in the meet.
Although I did manage to keep training in a roundabout way, it wasn’t until 2016 or so that I was fully recovered.
Come to think of it, that was the ONLY time I have ever been seriously injured through training, something I credit entirely to my approach which is and always has been (since that episode shocked me out of my powerlifting phase, anyways) centred around training in a way that lets me “daisy chain” as many “good enough” sessions together as possible.
A large part of that is staying injury free, and my methods for doing that are discussed in the October 2025 issue of The Phil Tyreman Letter (full deets in the P.S.).
It’s up there with one of the most important issues I have ever written, given it contains a tonne of “must know” info for anyone who is serious about still being able to train (or even get through the day without swallowing a mountain of painkillers!) ten years from now.
You can become a subscriber and get this issue for just £20 per month (or 66p per day, according to my maths). Which is fairly inexpensive in my opinion… and… if you decide you hate it or just change your mind, you’ve a full 30 days from when you subscribe to tell me as such and get a swift, courteous refund.
So, really, you’re not actually risking anything by giving it a shot (unless you don’t trust me to give you your £20 back, but then I doubt you’d still be reading this).
If you want October’s Injury Mitigation issue, deadline’s tonight (30th) at 23:59.
Subscription info here:
https://philtyreman.co.uk/information/
Thank you,
Phil Tyreman