The Sound of Severed Muscle

Why your "rest" is not rest

I still remember the sound of my muscle tearing. 

I don’t know if it was actually audible but, in my head, it sounded like the bang of a gunshot. 

At first, I wasn’t sure what happened. Maybe the ball popped? I thought.

Then I felt an excruciating, sharp pain fill my entire right quad from the top of my knee to my hip flexor. 

My right leg went limp, and I collapsed to the ground. Our team’s athletic trainer rushed onto the field and a few minutes later he was poking and prodding my severed muscle while I squirmed in pain. I had almost torn my entire vastus medialis, the muscle in my inner thigh. For the next hour, I sat in agony, watching my teammates finish practice and contemplating what had just happened. 

It was the fall of my junior soccer season at Villanova and our team was having one of the best seasons in our school’s history. We were poised to make the NCAA tournament, something Villanova had only done once before. On the field, I was also doing pretty well. I was the starting left back and had already racked up multiple assists midway through the season.  Off the field, it was a different story, but we’ll get to that.

Competing for a loose ball during my junior year at Villanova. Can you believe this guy? What is he scared, or something?

Sidelined

I had shown up to practice that day full of confidence and already looking forward to playing in crowded stadiums and having our games live-streamed on ESPN. After our usual 15 to 20-minute warm-up routine, we went right into an eight-on-eight, half-field scrimmage. At one point during the first few minutes, I was pressing high up the field, near the opposing team’s goal. Then, one of their defenders took a heavy touch and I saw a chance to steal the ball and take a shot on goal. I remember controlling the ball with my right foot to set up a curling shot into the top corner. I swung my leg around the ball to strike it with my instep. And that’s when I heard it–the deafening sound of shredding muscle fibers. 

Over the next few weeks, the swelling in my quad calcified into a solid ball of dried blood. It was like having a golf ball in my muscle as it tried to heal itself. I watched my team’s historic NCAA tournament run from the sidelines, as I desperately tried to rehabilitate my leg. But I never truly recovered until the start of the next season, many months later. 

I had my fair share of muscle injuries throughout my soccer career, but none as painful and demoralizing as this one. At the time, I couldn’t understand what had caused it. I wrote it off as an overuse injury, or physical exhaustion, weakness, or lack of aerobic fitness. 

I was just overworked, I told myself. I ran too much, or I wasn’t strong enough. 

As I look back at all the muscle injuries in my athletic career, I know that many of them are due, at least partially, to the fact that I had no idea what resting was. I thought I did, but in reality, I thought physical rest and mental rest were one and the same. 

Stress Leads to Physical Injury

Today, I find myself falling for the same misconception. And I see lots of other people falling for it too. The truth is, mental rest and physical rest are not the same, and until we learn how to rest and recharge our minds, we’ll never be able to perform at our highest level in sports or in life. 

While I did well for myself on the soccer field, most of my college career off the field was spent in a semi-panicked state. I was all confidence and poise with a ball at my feet, but in the other areas of my life, I was a nervous, disorganized, and constantly-stressed wreck. Had you met 20-year-old me, you’d probably think I was mellow, easygoing, and a bit quiet, but on the inside, I was tighter than a fully-stretched rubber band. When I wasn’t practicing soccer or doing school work, I was watching Netflix, scrolling social media, or going out with friends. I was caught in an endless loop of distractions and I had zero clue how to relax my mind. 

Almost all of my injuries happened during periods of mental exhaustion or burnout. Knowing what I know now, this makes sense. While it may seem obvious to some, stress causes our muscles to tense up. According to the American Psychological Association, “Muscle tension is almost a reflex reaction to stress—the body’s way of guarding against injury and pain. [...] Chronic stress causes the muscles in the body to be in a more or less constant state of guardedness.” So my constant stress in college was quite literally turning me into a fully-stretched rubber band. It was only a matter of time before I popped. 

What is Life Force?

Over the last few weeks, I’ve felt a similar sensation of burnout and mental exhaustion. I kept blaming this feeling on external factors like being busy or having too much on my plate, but deep down I know it was because I wasn’t letting my mind recover. I am not trying to say that you can’t feel burnout from being too busy or physically tired. But, I know that my burnout was a result of my habits. 

I am not sure where I first heard the term “life force” but it’s been popping into my head over the last month, as I’ve wrestled with ways to rest and recharge my mind. Maybe it was a not-so-subtle message from my subconscious telling me that it’s time to figure this out.

“My life force is so low,” I kept saying to myself, without really knowing what life force was. 

If you search for “life force” on Google, you’ll get several different definitions, all more or less describing the same thing. Life force, according to the internet, could be a dumbed-down version of the Sanskrit term “prana”, or its Chinese cousin “chi”. I can’t claim to know all the histories and entire spiritual meaning behind prana and chi, but–to give a much too simple translation–they basically mean “vitality”. Now think of the word vitality, but sprinkle in a generous tablespoon of spirituality. 

A photo of me on a climbing trip in Colorado… Maximum life force engaged.

Chi or Prana both describe a sort of all-encompassing, pervasive life force that is present in all living things. Based on what I’ve read about chi so far (which is admittedly very little), aside from the all-encompassing life force, we each have our own individual life force which determines not only our mental and spiritual well-being but also our physical health. 

I realize I am venturing a bit far into the realm of Yoga and Taoism, neither of which I can claim expertise on, so let me reign myself in a little bit. What I mean to say is, the feeling of burnout and physical injuries I’ve experienced can be traced back to a fully depleted life force. 

Back in college and again over the last few weeks, I was burning myself out simply because I thought physical rest, like sitting down or watching TV, was the same as mental rest. I know now that is not the case. If I’m sitting on the couch scrolling through social media, I might be physically resting but my mind is working harder than a coal miner in Kentucky.

Draining vs Recharging Activities

These days we are constantly bombarded with distractions. Look at us! We’ve come so far as humans that actually doing nothing is nearly impossible. It’s so easy to physically rest and then blitzkrieg our minds with stimulus. While watching Netflix, scrolling Instagram, or watching hours of YouTube might give us temporary relief from stress or anxiety, these activities come at an enormous cost. Think of your mind like a train car going downhill, each of these activities is like adding a cinder block’s worth of weight. Over time, the heavier the train car the faster it’s going to speed downhill until eventually you’ll lose control. 

These activities give us no life force. We know this. Ask any psychologist if scrolling TikTok or watching hours of YouTube videos or staying inside all day ever made anyone actually feel better. In this modern Western society, we’ve constructed a world less and less conducive to life force. In other words, we cannot recharge our life force passively. 

Some activities that are universally conducive to recharging life force are meditating, exercising, praying, playing, and spending time in nature. But I also think that each individual has their own “thing”. We all have our own ways of recharging our life force. In my own life, I know that exercising, climbing, writing, reading, hiking, surfing, running, or camping spike my vitality like no other activities. 

Sometimes mental rest is the exact opposite of physical rest. In my life, I’ve found that most of the time that’s the case. I feel the most mentally recharged when I do something physically demanding. Last week, when I was fed up with this constant feeling of burnout, I decided to sit down and create a new workout plan for myself. Then, on Monday, I woke up at 6:00 AM to tackle day one of this new regimen, which involved heavy squats and deadlifts. While it didn’t immediately solve my burnout, I felt a huge spike of energy and excitement after the workout. 

In the next few days, I started looking at myself like a battery. I needed to pinpoint what recharges me and what depletes me. Usually, recharging activities involve a singular focus. So activities like going for a walk without my phone, meditating, running, or climbing do the trick. On the other hand, anything that splits my attention, like most digital activities, is extremely draining. I’m still working on defining a clear metric for what exactly constitutes a recharging versus a draining activity. But, a simple question I’ve asked myself is: Is this activity fostering some sort of connection? I find that most activities that involve connection, whether it’s with myself, with my surroundings, with nature, or with other people, usually make me feel very recharged. So the goal for the ensuing week was to plug myself into as many things that recharged me and unplug myself from the things that depleted me.

A 35mm film photo I took off of a ski lift in Colorado recently. Being outside, especially in the mountains = life force.

How To Make Your “Rest” Actual Rest

Of course, physical rest is vital to performance and staying injury free. I’m not arguing that you should never take an off day. However, If you want to avoid mental burnout and the subsequent physical tightness that comes with it, you need to replace activities that overwhelm the mind with activities that recharge it. 

During my senior soccer season at Villanova–the year after I tore my quad muscle, I decided to delete all my social media accounts. Instead of spending my free time watching TV or scrolling my brain away, I would go on hikes with my girlfriend, read lots of books, and I even did yoga three times per week. And guess what? I didn’t get injured that whole season. Of course, the stretching component of yoga helped, but I think it was mostly due to my mind being much more relaxed when I was off the field. 

Today, I am still not fully recharged. I haven’t gotten my life force to peak levels just yet. But I do know what counts as rest and what doesn’t. I’m slowly starting to inject my prana with the good stuff, as the yogis say.