The Yorkshire Masters competition is on Sunday and just like last competition, I’ve managed to injure myself 2 weeks before! Last time it was a shoulder injury, which fortunately didn’t affect my lifting. This time I’ve strained my neck doing a new exercise last week.
I was stupid really, I should have known better not to try something new 10 days before a comp. However I went to a New Mills physio yesterday (the excellent Jo) and it doesn’t appear to be anything too serious, I’ve just strained a muscle at the base of my neck / top of my back, between my spine and left shoulder blade.
How did I do it? I was trying to practice my stability at the top of the clean & jerk by holding a 100kg bar over my head for 10 seconds. I managed 2 out of an intended 3 sets of 10 seconds each when I noticed the pain. I was about to start the 3rd set when sense kicked in: sudden neck pain = stop your workout!
I will take some solace from the fact that when this happened last time, I got a new personal best Olympic lifting total. In fact, I’ve found the complete set of results for this year’s British Masters on the Yorkshire and North East Counties Weightlifting site here: http://www.ynecawla.org.uk/bmwl09.htm Sadly the results are an images, so you can’t search for names, but I’m 3rd from the top.
What I have to decide now, is what sort of workouts to do this week? Conventional wisdom is to take it easy the week before a competition and I certainly need to do that to give my neck time to recover. However I don’t want to do nothing either… hmmm decisions decisions.
