Getting hurt sucks. There’s no sugarcoating it. It’s frustrating, painful, and often discouraging, but it happens. Injuries are part of training, and when they occur, we have two choices: we can let them derail us, or we can find a way to make it work. Some injuries are truly debilitating, where training would be unsafe or irresponsible, but most of the time there’s a way to stay active, stay learning, and stay improving. At Krav Maga Raleigh, we use the phrase: “Train around injuries, not through them.” We’ll get into more details and strategies for that in other posts, but for now it’s important to understand that we do want to recover, and we can do that while continuing to train and progress. The first step is mental. In many ways, the most important time to train is when you’re injured, because otherwise you risk losing something much greater than physical progress. You risk losing your momentum, your habits, and your identity as someone who shows up and fights for themselves. You started training because you had some sort of enemy. It might be a specific physical threat, it might be the general danger that we live with in society, it might be your health, your stress, your confidence, or your self-esteem, but there is something that you want to fight back against. And here’s the truth: If you stop training, you stop fighting. And if you stop fighting, the enemy wins. The other side of that is: The only way to lose is to quit. And that’s great news because it’s so simple! Most injuries are just another obstacle, like the traffic, or being busy at work. There are many ways to continue training, but none of them mean anything without the mindset and the drive to keep going.
