Why RICE is Often the Wrong Answer
RICE (Rest, Ice, Compression, and Elevation) refers to the process of letting an injury settle through passivity. While better than nothing, any person who has suffered from or worked with chronic injuries knows its limitations.
Ice impedes proper blood flow and should not be used more than is required. Pain does not always equal injury — it is possible for someone to be in a lot of pain with very little tissue damage, and vice versa.
Disc bulges are present in 19% of all people over 40 with NO symptoms at all. This means the origin of pain in the body is not a simple thing to understand — our nervous system is a highly complex and sensitive system that has learned to associate certain movements with danger, even long after the tissue has healed.
The MEAT Protocol
A more effective acronym for injury management is MEAT:
- Movement — In the initial stages of injury, choose ranges of motion and movements that do not provoke significant symptoms. Higher reps and holds are preferred over heavy loading.
- Exercise — Once a certain level of pain has subsided and range has been gained, we can start to exercise more conventionally with progressively increasing loads.
- Analgesia — Using various natural healing medicines is a great way to boost recovery. Essential oils, herbal remedies, and dietary anti-inflammatory strategies all have a role.
- Treatment — Using manual therapies like acupressure, acupuncture, and myofascial release are great supporting tools. Physical modalities (laser, TENS, EMS) can also be effective.
Prehabilitation
Prehab refers to strengthening joints and tissues to reduce the chance of accidental injury during training and daily life.
A simple example: a client's shoulder occasionally clicks or feels unstable when reaching overhead to a high shelf, but shows no pain during normal training. Rather than waiting for that instability to become a real injury, a prehab approach adds light, controlled overhead work with full range of motion — such as the prone Y-raise from Chapter 5 — several times a week, well before the joint is ever asked to handle a heavy load in that position.
As mentioned before, a stacked spine is the position where the surrounding muscles produce the most force with the least injury risk. But it is not the ONLY safe position. Life will inevitably require movement in positions other than neutral — and being weaker in those positions increases injury risk.
Training in unfamiliar ranges should be done slowly, with lighter weights, and without producing pain.
The diagram above shows how training only the "neutral" range makes you strong only in that range. The goal is to develop strength and resilience across all ranges over time.
Exercises for Lengthened Positions (require longer warm-up)
A muscle trained only in its shortened, contracted position (like the top of a bicep curl) stays comparatively weak and vulnerable at its lengthened, stretched position — precisely the range in which most non-contact strains and pulls actually occur. The exercises below deliberately load muscles in that longer, more vulnerable range, but because the tissue is under more stretch, they demand a slower, more thorough warm-up than a typical compound lift.
Poliquin Split Squat
- "Knee moves forward and downward like an escalator."
- "Touch hamstring to calf at the bottom."
Letting the rear knee travel forward, rather than dropping it straight down, deepens the stretch on the hip flexor of the rear leg far more than a standard split squat — directly training strength in a lengthened hip position that most lower-body work never touches.
Jefferson Curls
- "Roll one vertebra at a time — like a string of pearls."
- "Push your way downwards rather than falling down passively."
This is one of the only common exercises that deliberately flexes the spine under light load, rather than bracing it rigid — building resilience in spinal flexion (a position most strength training actively avoids) so that everyday bending and reaching no longer feel like an injury risk.
Other Lengthened Position Exercises
- "Pull belly button to the bench."
All three exercises share the same purpose from earlier in this section — each one takes a muscle group (obliques, hamstrings/erectors, or lats) to a longer stretch than clients typically experience in daily life, and trains real strength there rather than just flexibility.
Exercises for Shortened Positions
You strengthen the positions you train, and as we want to be strong everywhere we can be — within reason and progressively — these exercises serve an important role in a comprehensive programme.
As coaches, we are responsible for the success of our clients' goals. But for that, there are a few very important things to keep in mind: