Inquisitive.me

You hurt your back. You see a doctor, and the diagnosis comes: disc prolapse. Somewhere—maybe from friends, maybe from the internet—you’ve heard the warning: “No heavy lifting anymore. It’s dangerous.”

So you start avoiding. You ask your partner to carry the laundry baskets upstairs. You’re afraid to lift your shopping bags. You bend your knees more, change the way you move, and work around the problem. You tell yourself it’s fine—no need to do heavy lifting. Let others handle it.

Maybe this happens when you’re 25. Then, at 27, you get pregnant. At first, your baby weighs only a few kilos. But babies grow. And as the weight increases, you keep working around it. Your back adjusts a little, but that voice in your head stays: Watch out. Don’t injure yourself. Take care.

Then one day, your 5-year-old falls from the climbing frame. You react instantly, trying to catch them—and you injure yourself again. And suddenly, you have “proof.” Your brain says: See? Told you this was dangerous. But that’s the wrong conclusion. The problem wasn’t the movement—it was the years of not practicing it. You expected your body to know exactly what to do without keeping the muscles and patterns ready.

Or maybe it’s not your back—it’s your knee. You injure it playing football, tearing a ligament. You get surgery, do some rehab, and then promise yourself you’ll never jump again. Running? Probably not either. Better to avoid those movements than risk another injury.

Fast forward. Your child is 14 and asks you to play football. You give in. You laugh, get competitive, start enjoying yourself—until one wrong step. Another injury.

And maybe you don’t have kids at all. Maybe you’re reaching for a bowl that’s about to fall, or you need to jump over a stream on a hike. Injuries can happen not because you’ve been hurt before, but because you never rebuilt strength and skill—you avoided instead of training.

Think of it this way: imagine you’re a samurai in 15th-century Japan. Training camp is boring, so you skip the hard drills. Then war breaks out. Suddenly, you’re expected to be a master swordsman. You wouldn’t learn to fight during battle—you’d train beforehand, in a safe place where you can make mistakes and build skill without risking your life.

It’s the same for your mental resources. If you struggle with conflict, practicing on your hot-tempered boss is not the time to start. If you’re prone to panic attacks, you don’t begin learning breathwork in the middle of one. These skills need to be trained when you’re calm, so they’re automatic when stress hits.

When your body is in survival mode—whether physically or mentally—it can’t learn from scratch. It needs to already know the movement, the reaction, the pattern.

Athletes understand this. They train unusual, explosive, or awkward movements so they’re ready without thinking. Because if you have to think about how to move in a split second, it’s already too late.

Catching a falling child, saving a bowl from shattering, stabilizing your knee as you land—all of these happen in milliseconds. Your brain isn’t fast enough. Your spine is. Reflexes live there. Think of when you touch a hot oven. You jerk your hand back instantly, and only a second later your brain catches up: Oh—it’s not even hot.

That’s why you want to train these movements in safe conditions, where you control the weight, speed, range of motion, and difficulty. Not when you’re in danger. If you wait until you need it, it’s already too late.

So don’t tell yourself, I don’t have to do this, or I’ll never need that movement. You never know. And when the moment comes, you’ll wish you had practiced.

We can’t bubble-wrap ourselves forever. Avoiding a movement might work for a while, but it doesn’t erase the moment when life demands it from you. That starts with practicing in safe conditions, not hoping you’ll magically manage when the pressure’s on.

🧪 Let’s Experiment

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If you don’t practice a movement,
you can’t expect your body to know it when it counts.

Avoiding a movement might feel like protecting yourself, but it’s often the opposite—it leaves you unprepared for the moment you really need it. The safest way to keep your body ready is to train in low-risk situations before life throws the high-risk ones at you.

🎯 Try This:

• Pick a movement you’re afraid of, avoiding, or think you’ll never need—whether it’s bending forward with a rounded spine, kneeling on your injured leg, or balancing on one foot.
• Practice it in the safest, simplest way first. No weights. Use only the range of motion you feel comfortable with. Add as many points of contact as possible—your body learns best when it feels safe.
• Once that feels easy, gradually progress: increase your range of motion, then add a little weight, then slowly build up the load. Finally, make the movement more challenging. Don’t rush into faster or more complex variations until you have full control.

Think of it like ACL rehab: jumping doesn’t happen three weeks post-op. It comes after you can squat with weight, perform single-leg calf raises, do stable lunges, and step-ups with load. Only then do you add small, controlled jumps.

🧠 Final Thought:

The moment you need a movement is not the moment to learn it. Train when it’s safe—so your body will be ready when it’s not.

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Keep it simple, stay curious, and keep learning—you’ve got this.

Take care,

Carina 🦊