How I fixed every training injury I’ve had

This video presents strategies for managing three common training injuries: torn muscles, tendonitis, and joint pain. For muscle tears, Jack recommends patience and rest (typically 6 weeks for healing), channeling training energy into unaffected muscle groups, and using progressively lighter work to rebuild strength once initial healing occurs. For tendonitis, the approach involves technique modifications to minimise impact on affected tendons, reducing training volume, maintaining manageable intensity, and performing direct eccentric work on the affected tendons to promote collagen reorganisation. For sternum pain caused by excessive chest strength without adequate range of motion, Jack prescribes German hangs as a mobility solution to open up pectoral flexibility. Overall, the key principles are managing the psychological impact of injury, maintaining training where possible, prioritising recovery, and using targeted rehabilitation techniques to return safely to full training capacity.

Here’s a harsh truth you probably don’t want to hear. You’re going to get injured. I hope you don’t, but if you are training well, then at some point you’re going to run into issues with your body that temporarily stop you from being able to train. And you can either let these derail your training forever or you can equip yourself to deal with them. So in this video, I want to share with you three temporarily debilitating issues that I’ve had to work through, covering a torn muscle, tendonitis, and intense joint pain, and show you the specific tools that allowed me to resolve each of them and get back to getting stronger than ever. And the last of these is absolutely worth its weight in gold. Late last year, I woke up one day unable to pull with my left arm without crifling pain right here. Turns out what had happened is I’d somehow torn the long head of my left tricep.
Don’t ask me how I think it was some combination of overworking at filming tutorials for you guys, doing lots and lots of takes with way more volume than I would ever train with normally. That plus a night sleeping on it weirdly and it was done. This put me out of action from pulling training for over two months. I then spent a third month rehabbing it, getting it back to full strength. And spoiler, it’s now 100% fine back to doing front levers and one-on-chairs. So here’s how I dealt with this. First of all, these experiences are horrible. They can be terrifying if you really care about your training, to the point where I think the biggest risk with these sorts of injuries is often psychological, because it’s really easy to start catastrophizing and thinking, “Oh my God, if I can’t pull now, I’m never going to be able to train these movements ever again.” And it’s so important to remember that that mindset of wanting to act now, that’s the very mindset that gets you results normally when you’re healthy.
It’s a functional trait. It’s just that right now when you’re injured, it’s normal outlet is blocked, and that’s why it’s so difficult to deal with. But there are ways you can channel it. And so the second step is to do what you can. With muscular injuries, really all you can do is rest and let the muscle heal. The good news is it’s highly vascular and usually within six weeks, muscle tears have more or less alleviated themselves. And in that time, there are often still plenty of movements that you can do without pain. And so for me, while I couldn’t train any vertical or horizontal pulling, I was able to spend this time just channelling all my upper body energy into working with my pushing, my hands and pushups, my plan to push up strength. And over those months, I made a lot of progress with that strength and I could see it in my physique.
So while it’s flattening to not be able to work on everything, think about this rehab period as channelling the same energy and recovery ability into different aspects of your strength. The third step while you’re doing that is to use lighter work to build back up. The good thing about being able to scale the difficulty of your training up to be constant max effort is that by the same skill, you can actually also bring the difficulty right down to allow yourself to ease back into using the muscle as it heals. And so for me, the most affected movement pattern with this injury was my rowing, my horizontal pulling. And so as I started to be able to flex the muscle a little bit, I started doing rows that were just way lighter than normal. I was unable to jump up into a tuck front lever and do this sort of thing.
But a few months in, I was able to start using these lighter progressions, the exact same progressions that you would use as a beginner in your training journey, and just do lighter work going through the motions. Normally, there’s no point bringing the difficulty down anything below what you can do at max output, because normally we’re trying to stimulate strength and muscle gain. But when you’re rehabbing a torn muscle, this sort of lighter work can be really useful for stimulating blood flow to the area, promoting more healing, for allowing you to start to build back up confidence using the muscle, and for you to figure out where your current pain free limit is so that as your muscle continues to heal, you can step up that intensity bit by bit until eventually when it’s fully back up and running, you’re working at 100%. And this is exactly what my process looks like.
I had about eight weeks of not really being able to do anything, and from week nine onwards, I started using these lighter row progressions, easing back into it, just getting a pump, using whatever intensity I could to work the muscle without pain. And so that probably went from about 60% strength at week nine to 70 to 80 to 90. And by about the 12 week mark, I was pulling fully hard max effort again, straight off the bat at the start of my set. Now it’s the thing of the past, completely fine. The takeaway here with muscular injuries is that you really need to just have patience because these sorts of injuries do resolve themselves. So the most important thing you can do is not stress and try to channel your energy in the meantime into other productive training. And just a quick note before we move on to the next injury, realise that these sorts of muscular injuries are almost always the result of overtraining, not of using too much intensity.
And this is the big reason why I emphasise making every bit of training that you do count so that you can get in, get effective training done to simulate a result, and then get out and allow your body to recover. Now I want to share with you two specific tools that have been critical in getting me back up and running from these two other injuries that I faced. The first will likely have affected many of you, and as I said, the other is the closest thing to a silver bullet that I’ve ever found in training. So at times, my elbows flare up, specifically what’s called the medial epicondyle of my elbow, golfer’s elbow. When you get pain in the tendons that insert here, many of you may have experienced this, it’s pretty frustrating. When this issue was at its worst, it was actually physically painful to grip onto the rings or the bar.
And as you can imagine, that makes doing one. I’m chin up training pretty difficult, but I didn’t stop vertical pulling training entirely. I just changed three things. The first was actually technique. So these muscles aren’t actually prime movers in a one-up chin up, but they are necessary to grip you to the anchor point, the ring or the bar. And so when I was doing my chin-up training, I tried to minimise all work of these muscles by relaxing my grip as much as possible, avoiding any excessive wrist flexion like this, and allowing my wrist to turn naturally through whatever was the most comfortable, natural feeling, plane of motion as I did my pulling work. And this is another great advantage of using gymnastics rings is that they can turn naturally as you pull, so you can move through what is the most natural path for your body everywhere.
So if you’re having these sorts of issues, I’d highly recommend using a ring instead of a fixed bar where you can’t move your wrist. The second step was that I kept training volume to an absolute minimum. If it’s pulling training that’s aggravating the tendonitis, I don’t want to be doing any extra work than absolutely necessary. So again, I would get in, try and get some work that would stimulate the prime movers of the one arm chin up to grow and then get out and minimise wear and tear on the tendons themselves. And then thirdly, I trained at an intensity that I could handle without too much discomfort. Now with the changes I just mentioned, this didn’t have to drop too much. I was able to still keep intensity pretty high. There’s an actual specific rehab exercise that allowed me to get that intensity back up to 100% quickly.
I said before that with muscle injuries, it’s really a game of patience. You have to wait for your body to heal. With tendons, it’s a little different. There is evidence to suggest that direct work on the affected tendons themselves can promote them to reorganise themselves, produce new collagen, and get stronger, especially eccentric loading or negatives. While the science on this stuff is all really quite mixed and unclear, in my experience, some direct work has been really helpful in speeding up the recovery and allowing me to get back to pulling hard. And so with this golfer’s elbow issue, my approach was very simple. I would just put my palm against the wall and work on flexing my wrist, feeling those affected tendons work. Again, some level of discomfort here is almost what I was seeking out. Not intense pain, but just stimulus of the affected area so I know it was working.
And I would just keep this super simple, work it for reps as desired. I would just do this in between my sets when I’m waiting. I’ve done my handstand pushup training and I’m about to do my one arm chin ups. I would just rep them out either arm. And I basically just did this every time I trained until the issue stopped annoying me and I forgot about it. Okay. Now this last injury was perhaps the scariest, but the solution is also the craziest. I promised I’d give you a silver bullet. Here it is. Early days of my training career, like 2016, I was testing my back lever strength, which was not that impressive at the time. And as I did it, I felt this crack in my sternum and dropped off the rings. And when I got back up, I realised that I couldn’t push horizontally.
Even basic pushups were impossible without this sharp pain in the middle of my chest. And as you can imagine, I was pretty worried, especially when this issue hadn’t resolved itself days or weeks later. And the solution to this one actually lay in mobility or flexibility training. Now, I say this a lot. Most functional range of motion is going to be covered by you just training your strength movements properly across a full range of motion, which most people don’t do. So if you haven’t got that in place, it is always where I would start. And if you want to know what movements I use, what full range of motion looks like, what progressions there are to build up to them. I made a simple guide on all of them. You can download that for free links into the description, 100% the most important place to start.
But building off that base, this is an example where in addition to that basic range of motion, some extended work to specifically open up certain joints can actually be life changing. And so unable to push a door open without pain, I dove into the research, scouring the web. I was deep digging into some backwater movement culture forum. When I found someone who was talking about having the exact same experience, and they said that this specific mobility movement had alleviated the problem entirely for them. And so Reddit Australian thing, I went hard at it, unlocked the movement to its full range of motion, and as I did, problem solved. And this magic movement, this silver bullet of sternum saving is the German hang. From research and my understanding of anatomy, it seems to be that this sternum issue can happen when you build too much chest strength without the accompanying range of motion in your pec muscles and your pecs basically get really strong but really tight and pull on your sternum.
Often this happens with people really pushing their bench press. In my case, it was back levers. But the German hang solves this by opening up the accessible range of motion for your pecs. What’s clear is that as I unlock this mobility, the pain alleviated itself just as quickly as it had come about. And every time that it’s threatened to rear its head again, German hangs have quickly dissipated it. So I’m pretty confident in the cause of relationship, again, at least for my body. So if you do ever make too many pushing gains and run into this issue, keep this in your back pocket. In fact, I think a German hang built to this full level is just a worthy standard for everyone to get to. It doesn’t need to take more than a couple months of targeted work so that you are ahead of the curve and don’t run into this issue in the first place.
Again, secondary to just nailing all your strength basics, but a worthwhile thing to think about adding once you are making steady progress on all your strength movements. You can learn how to build that here. So that’s how I’ve navigated three of the bigger training related injuries that I’ve run into in my time. These things are not fun to deal with. They are part of the game. These tools have helped me massively. Hopefully they can help some of you too get back to training as soon as possible.