Pete Wright:
Welcome to Build for Health, a show that redefines strength because muscle isn’t just for looks. I’m Pete Wright here with Coach Srdjan Injac, and today we’re talking about the incident. Srdjan, you have one job. You have one job, and that job is to teach people how not to get hurt while getting strong. So naturally, you threw yourself on the ground and broke your arm.
Srdjan Injac:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Please, please set us up. I want you to take me there. I want to feel it. Tell me about the experience that landed you in the position you’re in right now.
Srdjan Injac:
I thought it would be a good idea to go for a bike ride.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
So…
Pete Wright:
Well, there’s your first mistake.
Srdjan Injac:
I know. It was a nice day. I thought it was gonna be great. I’m gonna do something fun, go on a bike ride. I’ve ridden a bike before. Nothing happened. It’s fine.
Pete Wright:
You know how to ride a bike.
Srdjan Injac:
This is not what I was planning on when I went on the bike ride. I was by myself, probably about an hour and a half from town.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
I found a nice trail, and halfway through — I was riding my bike, everything was fine — and then I just saw something in the corner of my eye. I thought there was something coming at me, and I kinda lost balance. I swerved and went off the path and got on the gravel, and I was going a little bit fast, so I ended up trying to get back on the road. I ended up just flipping over and falling awkwardly and breaking my hand.
Pete Wright:
Okay. Okay, when did you know it wasn’t a shake-it-off kind of injury? And be honest — did you really try to shake it off?
Srdjan Injac:
Well, I tried to get up, but I fell down, and I’m like, this was embarrassing. Okay, get back on the bike and let’s go. So I try to get up, and as I try to use my hand to kind of lean on it, I fall again, and I’m like, what’s going on? And I look at my hand and I’m like, this doesn’t work right. It wasn’t like the bone was sticking out or anything like that. You can tell it was offside. I thought it was maybe dislocated first. So I grabbed my hand and I was moving it, trying to put it back in place, and then as I’m doing it, I hear all the cracking and all that stuff. I’m like, well, that’s not dislocated.
Pete Wright:
Oh God, man. Oh God.
Srdjan Injac:
And I kept trying. I’m like, maybe it is. Maybe it just cracks back and it’s gonna be fine. And I keep trying to adjust back and forth. I was moving it a lot. And then I’m like, you know what, this is broken. It’s not dislocated. I broke my radius. This is not good.
Pete Wright:
Okay, so you’re talking about moving it around — when you’re not doing anything with it at that point, what’s your pain scale, from “I stub my toe” to “I’m calling the paramedics”?
Srdjan Injac:
I didn’t really feel that much pain, really, because of all the adrenaline, all that blood flow, and how warm it was. When it just happened, you don’t really feel the pain. You just see it. I’m trying to adjust, and then I realize what’s going on. I’m like, all right, I need to stop messing around. This is not working. This is broken. I need to go to the ER. So I immediately stopped because I didn’t want to make things worse. Ended up going to the ER, finding out that it was what they call an oblique fracture. So it was a clean break. It was a Saturday night, so they couldn’t do the surgery right away. They said I had to wait till Monday, call the doctor, schedule an appointment, and probably schedule the surgery. So for two days I was sitting at home with the broken arm. They just put a splint on, tried to adjust as much as they could. That was pretty painful.
Pete Wright:
Okay, so that’s when things start to hurt.
Srdjan Injac:
But yes.
Pete Wright:
Like when there’s swelling, I imagine.
Srdjan Injac:
Once I got to the ER —
Pete Wright:
Okay. Once you got to the ER it starts to hurt.
Srdjan Injac:
That’s when it started hurting, when I was in the ER. They were like, can you move this way, that way? I’m like, no, it’s not moving anywhere. Not at all. I couldn’t. Every time they even touched it a little bit, it was a lot of pain. But I know they have to adjust it, so I’m like, do whatever you need to do. They tried, and it was like, this is the best we could do. They just put a splint on it, told me to try not to move much, a lot of pain meds, and wait till Monday.
Pete Wright:
So I know much of what we want to talk about today is the journey back, but I do think that was the injury. Just tell me — Monday you go in for surgery. And I’m gonna call that you’re at the hardware store, because they’ve done some things to you and now you have stuff in your arm. Tell me what’s actually going on in your arm right now.
Srdjan Injac:
Well, the surgery was Tuesday. Appointment with the doctor was Monday, and the next day they got me in right away, Tuesday. So I have a plate, to keep that arm secure, to keep the bone secure, and I have eight screws in it. You have to put eight screws to keep that plate in place. I didn’t really know — I really thought it was only a few screws, but then once I saw the X-ray, it was eight screws and one plate on my radius. So yeah, he had to put those in. Luckily I didn’t have to have any pins in my wrist, because everything shifted. When the bone breaks, everything kind of shifts. Your radius breaks, your ulna goes up, all those bones in your wrist will shift. But they shifted back right away as soon as he fixed it. So luckily I didn’t really need to have any pins, and that would have been a lot worse. So I was kinda lucky at the same time.
Pete Wright:
You’re an evidence-based guy. Did you find you were already being sort of that patient when the surgeon is telling you what he’s going to do and what to expect?
Srdjan Injac:
Yeah, I was already thinking about the rehab. I’m like, what do I need to do? How do I get myself back on track? Asking him all these questions, trying to figure out how bad it is, how long it’s gonna take, things like that. He was really good explaining everything. Everything made sense. Before the surgery, he didn’t really know if we needed pins or not. He was like, we’ll see how the surgery goes, let you know. The surgery was about two hours. He said it was good. The surgery went well.
Pete Wright:
Okay, so let’s dig into the rehab and recovery. Walk me through the recovery time you were quoted versus what’s going on in your head as you’re privately thinking, I think I can do better. What does that gap look like?
Srdjan Injac:
Well, I already knew, for the bone to heal, it takes six weeks. Doesn’t matter what kind of break, it’s six weeks for the bone to heal. I’m like, okay, I don’t know if I can quite speed that up, but there are some ways, maybe. And then you have to strengthen the muscles and everything around it. So it takes about three months after the surgery in order to be able to go back to lifting heavy weights, go back into the gym, stuff like that. So I’m like, okay, six weeks for the recovery, the bones are healed, it’s fine. But three months — that’s a long time. I’m gonna try to cut that into two months. So I started thinking about every possible way I can do that, every single therapy I can think of. And I’m like, I’m gonna try to put it all together. And that’s what I’ve been doing.
Pete Wright:
Okay, so let’s walk through what you’ve been doing specifically. I’m really interested to hear this because I’ve heard mixed stories about some of the things we’ve been talking about. So walk me through the core tent poles of your journey here.
Srdjan Injac:
Yeah, so I started right away with the red light therapy. I have a red light therapy device. It’s medical grade. It’s really great. And I started doing that right away, about two to three times a day, every single day.
Pete Wright:
What is red light therapy, for people who’ve never heard of it, or don’t know what it is, or have heard conflicting reports — what is it doing?
Srdjan Injac:
Yeah, so it works by penetrating into the tissue and helping to produce more ATP, which is basically the fuel for your cells. They’re used to repair and regenerate everything. It can also support collagen production, improve circulation to the injury area, reduce inflammation, and potentially speed up bone and soft tissue healing.
Pete Wright:
And you’re just putting your arm in front of a light bulb, right? Really, there’s a machine that’s producing red light at a certain wavelength.
Srdjan Injac:
Yes, you bring it pretty close. You try with about five, six minutes. So think of it as enhancing your body’s ability to repair itself at the cellular level. That’s what it does. I knew that from before, so I’m like, okay, this will be great.
It also helped a little bit because — there’s red light therapy, and then you have blue light therapy, which doesn’t really penetrate through the skin. Those are usually used for things like acne. It kills certain bacteria, but it will help with the scar in the healing. So I used both red and blue light, and that was actually helping warm up the area, and I’m able to do my little exercises and start going through the physical therapy. So that’s been pretty helpful. I started doing it right away.
Pete Wright:
Okay, so red light therapy, we’ve got that on the books. What else are you doing?
Srdjan Injac:
After that, I work with an IV clinic called Alive, so I called the doctor there. And I started going over there once a week getting the IV. So IV therapy — she made a mix that was specific for my injury, what I needed.
Pete Wright:
Nice little cocktail.
Srdjan Injac:
Yeah. You need all these vitamins and all that stuff, and we drink all these multivitamins daily — it’s just not enough. I need extra. I need more for this healing, for the repair. So pretty much what’s in this IV, it’s B-complex vitamins — all the B vitamins. There’s vitamin C in it, there’s magnesium in it, there’s also a couple of amino acids in it. And she also adds NAD, and we talked about NAD a little bit before. It’s cell rejuvenation, improves the communication between the cells. So putting all this together, this IV therapy is optimizing my internal environment for healing.
Pete Wright:
Okay. How often are you doing that? Every other day?
Srdjan Injac:
Once a week.
Pete Wright:
Once a week.
Srdjan Injac:
Once a week.
Pete Wright:
Okay.
Srdjan Injac:
Yeah, because she’s putting so much of these vitamins and all this stuff. So once a week is plenty. You don’t need to go every day. That would be a little too much. But I have better circulation, less inflammation, there’s more building blocks available. So I think it’s a pretty powerful tool for your body. I’ve been doing that once a week. That’s been helping a lot as well.
Pete Wright:
All right, so IV therapy, red light treatment — now we’re getting into some crazy stuff.
Srdjan Injac:
Yeah. And this is why I’m doing my own physical therapy every day. I go see the physical therapist once a week. I don’t really need to see him that often. I saw him for the first time, and he was like, well, you already know what you’re doing, and you’ve already been doing these exercises, and this is your first time here. He thinks right now that I’m one week ahead of what a normal, regular person would be doing. Which is great. That’s kind of what I was planning on doing. That was the whole purpose of this.
Pete Wright:
I’m so glad you brought it up, because that’s right — we’re talking about IV therapy and red light, and not once have we mentioned actual movement therapy, actually doing the physical therapy. So you are doing that too. Just, for those who want to write letters, you are doing that too. Now let’s talk about the little room.
Srdjan Injac:
Little room. So I was lucky, actually — not a lot of people have access to this, but I have a client who has a hyperbaric chamber. It’s a hyperbaric oxygen chamber in his house. So he let me use it. I’ve done it twice so far. It is pretty intense.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, what is it supposed to do?
Srdjan Injac:
It works by placing your body in a pressurized environment while you’re breathing close to sixty percent oxygen — that’s what I’ve been getting — which dramatically increases how much oxygen your body can absorb. And it’s not just red blood cells, but it dissolves directly into your blood plasma. The difference is — not just the red blood cells — but plasma can reach areas where circulation is limited, especially after an injury like mine.
So this huge amount of oxygen that’s available helps drive several healing mechanisms. It stimulates the production of new blood vessels and supports the activity of what’s called osteoblasts, which are the cells responsible for building new bone. It also enhances collagen formation, which is essential for repairing connective tissue. It increases the supply of all these repair cells circulating to the injury site. On top of that, it does help with reducing inflammation, limiting swelling, improves the efficiency of my immune system, it helps clear damaged tissue, and it lowers the infection risk as well. So it does so much. It’s crazy.
Pete Wright:
So tell me, just a little sidebar — because we’re talking about all the good stuff that it’s apparently doing to you, but what’s it like?
Srdjan Injac:
Oh my God. So the first time — because I’ve never used it before, and I know athletes use it all the time, the military uses it all the time, so it’s not very available to a lot of people. The first time when I walked in, he was like, I’m gonna put you on level one. It looks like a little submarine. You walk in, and he set it up really nice — it has a little carpet in it, a little AC, flat-screen TV. It’s like a little submarine. You sit in this chair, it’s like a recliner, and you put your legs up. You turn on the AC. I’m like, oh, this is so nice and comfortable. I’m like, this is great.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, you’re pressure maxing.
Srdjan Injac:
Until the door closes, shuts. And I’m like, whoa, this is not cool. Then he was like, level one, we’re gonna drop you down about 40 feet under the water. So that’s kind of how much pressure you’re gonna get. And it goes for about nine minutes while it’s slowly dropping you down. And that pressure when it builds up — oh my God. You can’t hear anything, your ears are about to pop out, your head feels like it’s gonna explode. It’s like, oh my God, this is intense. And you just gotta calm down, breathe, relax, try to relax, not panic, all that stuff.
And after nine minutes — because you stay in there for a whole hour. So when it started, I’m like, when is this gonna finish? It’s been five minutes, six, seven minutes, and I’m like, it’d better stop pretty soon. I hope it’s not like this for a whole hour. So after nine minutes it stops, and then after that it’s just normal. You just sit there. I was watching a movie, and it’s fine. I was breathing about — it says about fifty-eight to sixty percent oxygen. Because right now we breathe about twenty percent oxygen. So inside under that pressure, I was breathing about sixty — so three times more than what we’re breathing right now. But it’s the combination of both that helps. You can’t just have one and not have the other.
So the second time when I went, it was like, all right, now you know what to expect. How about we drop you down to sixty feet under the water? Because the first level — he explained — it helps with healing your soft tissue, like muscles and ligaments and tendons and stuff like that. It doesn’t really get into your bone yet, because there’s not enough pressure. So at 60 feet now we’re gonna go into bone healing. So I’m like, all right, let’s do it. Now, that was intense. That was like times two on what happened. With twenty more feet, I almost tapped out. I thought about turning it off, because you can turn it off from inside.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
And it was like, okay, I can do this. And then I started getting a little dizzy, and everything started shaking in front of my eyes, and I started sweating, and I’m like, okay, now I’m just in panic mode. I’m like, I need to relax, breathe. And I tried to collect myself and just relax and not think of it. Then I’m like, it’s gonna be fine. It’s gonna be okay. Just talking to myself at the same time. It was crazy. And after nine minutes, I’m like, oh, thank God.
Pete Wright:
And it felt good after nine minutes, true to form?
Srdjan Injac:
It stopped. After nine minutes, feels normal, feels nothing. You’re just sitting in this little room, just watching TV. And when it’s done, that extra nine minutes while it brings you back up, it feels fine. It’s normal. You can get through it.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. No disorientation?
Srdjan Injac:
No, none of that. It is actually helping. I’m trying to pop my ears, because once I got out, I’m like, I can’t hear anything. It’s like being in an airplane when you’re landing and your ears are — you’re trying to pop them. So it’s the same thing, just a lot more intense. So when I came out, I just couldn’t hear anything. That was really intense, and I don’t know if I’m gonna do level two again. It’s a little too much. I might just stick with level one and help with the muscle, ligaments, and tendons repair. For the bone, I only have two more weeks to go until it’s normally healed, plus I add all this stuff. So hopefully — even now after four weeks, the physical therapist said, you’re fine, you can start doing things. I’m like, I’m already doing things that I probably should be doing after my six weeks.
Pete Wright:
So let’s get into that, because here we are — there’s a mental game, working through whose expectations you’re actually trying to beat. Are you beating the surgeon’s, or the PT’s, or your own? And how does that get in your head when you’re watching clients lift while you can’t? What does that do to you?
Srdjan Injac:
Oh, it drives me crazy. But it helps me, because now I have all these other things I’m trying to achieve. I’m challenging myself now, and I like having something I can work towards. Just trying to speed up my rehab and do something that no one’s done before, maybe — and see if I can speed it up, if I can impress the doctor and the therapist and all that stuff. So that kind of helps me stay occupied with that and not think about heavy lifting and all that stuff.
But there’s another thing I just started last week, to preserve my muscle mass and strength, because I don’t want to lose it. There’s a couple things you can do. And this is actually important for everybody — if you fracture your bones, an arm, a leg, it doesn’t matter what it is, and you can’t lift, but you have the other side that’s completely healthy, you should still continue lifting with that one side. It helps because it’s called the cross-education effect. You guys can Google that and find it. It helps the way it sends the message to your brain through the nervous system, and the way the brain sends it back, it sends it to both sides. So you can preserve a lot of muscle mass and strength by just working on with one side, preserving on the other side as well. It’s crazy how the body works.
Pete Wright:
Well, it is crazy. I’ve heard of cross-education, and I’ve also heard that there are detractors who say it’s gym lore — and especially if you’re injured, you have to be so careful. You and I have talked about this. There are so many systems that are connected — ropes and pulleys that are connected to your arm. Just working with your other arm, how much risk does that put on you for re-injury?
Srdjan Injac:
Yeah, because I’m trying not to use my other arm too — I’m mimicking the movement. I’m just not holding the weight. When I’m doing mid-back rows, I’m pulling weight with one, but the other one I’m just moving, pretending like I have a weight. And I can still squeeze my back. There’s just not weight on that side, and I’m still squeezing both sides. So it sends the message like I’m squeezing both sides, like I’m doing with both arms. So you can mimic the movement and just do it with one arm. Of course, the workout’s gonna have to change. You’re gonna probably get a really strong core, because you’re gonna have to use your core the entire time.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, a lot.
Srdjan Injac:
So by the end of this, I think I’m gonna have a pretty strong core, stronger than I’ve ever had. Because I’m using my core nonstop now, which is great. So I’m looking at all the benefits, all the things I’m getting out of it. I try to think about the muscle mass that I’m losing a little bit of, the strength, and stuff like that. So that’s what helps me get through this process — thinking about all the good things I’m doing to my body, some of the benefits.
And I started doing this thing called Body 20. So Body 20 is this concept built around electro muscle stimulation training. You wear a specialized suit. It’s got these little pads on your major muscle groups. And it sends a low level of electrical impulses to those muscles while you’re performing a simple movement, like squatting, lunges, shoulder press, tricep kickbacks, something like that. You do those for about twenty minutes. The way it works, you do it for ten seconds and then you stop ten seconds, and you go again ten seconds. And while you’re working out, it’s sending those electrical impulses. So the idea is that these impulses cause your muscle to contract more intensely. So there’s no heavy weights or anything like that. Literally, you can hold three pounds, five pounds — that’s what I’ve been holding right now, about three pounds, because I can’t hold more in my arm. And it’s recruiting a higher percentage of muscle fibers. Those impulses are helping.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
So I’m trying to use that to retain as much muscle mass as I possibly can, and the strength. And actually, it’s helping. After that, I feel pretty sore all around.
Pete Wright:
Okay.
Srdjan Injac:
I still can’t do too much on the biceps and tricep of that arm, because the bicep is connected to the radius, to that bone. Even though it’s not close to the injury site, sometimes if it’s too much contraction, I can feel it kind of shooting down my arm. And it feels kind of weird, and then I can start feeling the site that’s injured. It doesn’t really hurt, but it’s kind of a weird feeling.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Srdjan Injac:
It feels like it’s tightening up and stuff like that. So I’ll go down a notch a little bit. But it’s helping contract my muscles, and hopefully that helps too. So doing all these things.
Pete Wright:
So has — it’s been a month. Has this changed in any way how you find your training? A 60-year-old recovering from a fall? Tell me honestly, anything you tell clients now that you might have found you used to roll your eyes at?
Srdjan Injac:
I mean, I knew all these things and the benefits of every single one of them. And for me, this is just a chance to try to use all of them and see actually what works, what doesn’t, what helps me get there faster. So I’m kind of experimenting all these things on myself, so I can help people later and tell them, hey, this is what’s gonna help, this is what helped me, when it comes to muscles or bones or whatever kind of injury they have. So all my clients are the same. Every single day, there’s more stuff I can do. Stronger. I can rotate my wrist, I can move more — literally every single day, I feel like I can do more and more. I’m gonna keep going and keep doing and see what helps. I think all these things do help to some extent, but you have to be consistent with them. That’s the thing. It’s consistency.
Pete Wright:
Well, I’ll tell you what, man — I think you just cashed in on the policy you’ve been selling all along. To what degree all the individual treatments you’re taking on are contributing to your comeback, I don’t know. But to me, the reason you come back faster isn’t luck or genetics. It’s that there was something to come back to. This is muscle as insurance writ large. You have something to build back to. And I’ll tell you what, from my perspective, if you’ve been waiting for a sign that strength training is worth the effort, watching your strength coach come back from a plated forearm surgery ahead of schedule is probably it. It has been crazy watching you. I have scolded you a number of times in the gym, but I have no platform on which to stand. This has been a stunning recovery.
Srdjan Injac:
Because the doctors and the physical therapist told me right away — because of what you do and how long you’ve been training, you have such great muscle memory. And that’s one of the reasons I didn’t need to have pins in my wrist. Everything shifted back. The muscles just pulled everything back. It was amazing. They said, you’re in great shape. You’re gonna recover so much faster — even if you hadn’t been doing all these things, just because of your muscle memory and the strength you have, it’s gonna speed up so much more. So doing all these things on top of everything, it changes everything. So yeah, you gotta think of that as well when you go training. The recovery is gonna be amazing.
Pete Wright:
It’s been crazy to watch this, and I’m just really, really impressed. So listen, we’re glad you joined us today, everybody. If you’ve got questions about the recovery or training or whatever’s going on for Srdjan in particular, or how to make strength work in your life, we want to hear your questions. Head to the show notes and use the link in there to send a question to us. We’ll get it answered on an upcoming show. Don’t forget to subscribe and share. This is how we grow stronger together. Thank you so much for listening to Build for Health. We’ll catch you in the gym next week.
