To find your entry point is a super important part of my rehab approach with lifters.
An entry point in simple terms is finding what hurts, what doesn’t hurt and balancing the two. We find that right exercise or right amount of weight that we can do without continually aggravating the issue.
Let’s use shoulder pain with a bench as the example.
Let’s say that we have a lifter. He/She has pain in the shoulder when we are going for a full depth bench press. So pain in the shoulder right off the chest. The pain doesn’t happen with relatively low weight, but at that higher weight.. OUCH.
However, we obviously don’t want to stop lifting relatively heavy on bench and risk losing our gains.
So, what do we do?
Obviously, we would have checked form, changed grip, sets/reps, etc. by now.
However, if there hasn’t been a change yet, then we look at changing to a multi-grip bar, or dumbbells.
If we have pain with one, then we will just bump to a level lower on bench press.
Look at the graphic below to see how we modify.
To expand on this, say we have pain with dumbbell bench, then we drop to pin bench, if pain there, floor press, etc. We want to be conservative on stripping lifts away because we still want to hit our goals, but in the same regard, we want to make sure that we are reducing the lift enough to give our injured area time to calm down.
We use this same principle to find your entry point for squats, deadlifts, shoulder press, etc.
Finding our entry point by this technique is crucial to continue lifting, continue PROGRESSING our lifts, all while allowing our body the time it needs to heal.
I hope this is helpful to keep you nailing those PR’s, even if battling an injury.
If you are ready to take this approach in your rehab and have someone guide you past this injury, click here and schedule a complimentary consult with us!