There are innumerable injuries which can be associated with bodybuilding, but there are 3 which are more prevalent than any others.The first of these would be the lower back injury, which may range anywhere from slight discomfort to a herniated disc.

While either of these would require time off from heavy squatting, dead lifting, and potentially military pressing and cleaning, the latter would necessitate a serious break from lifting altogether and possibly surgery.

The way that this injury is normally sustained is from dead lifting with improper form, dead lifting without the proper equipment, or a combination of both.

By improper form, I don't mean that everyone's form is perfect, but there are a few tips one can remember to prevent this sort of thing from occurring. One, keep your shoulders back and look straight ahead, and don't bend your head down.

Two, and most importantly, make sure that your legs don't straighten out at the beginning of the lift, but rather that they are slightly bent, gradually straightening all the way to the lockout (top portion of the lift). In the way of equipment, not a whole lot is necessary, but I would strongly recommend a weight belt.

Nothing fancy is needed, an investment of $20 will get you a rudimentary but highly functional leather belt. A belt serves not only to regulate your breathing and compress your muscles, but (most importantly) it keeps you from arching your back too far inwards while you're pulling up on the dead lift or going up on your squat, which is where the lower back injuries usually happen.

Next is the knee injury, usually a meniscus or ACL tear. This one is particularly bad; as once you get it you'll forever have a higher risk of re-aggravating it. It's most commonly suffered by power lifters or other people training in the low rep high weight range who for some crazy reason think that by going as low as humanly possible with as much weight as humanly possible on their shoulders they are doing themselves more good than were they to do the exact same motion, only with 4-6 inches taken off the range of motion.

When you're pushing against both gravity and a huge load on your shoulders, your knees (which cannot grow muscle and are thereby not as well equipped to handle heavy loads as, say your quads) gradually grind against themselves and wear down. The easiest way to prevent this is just to go parallel or no more than 2 inches below parallel.

Last, we have the rotator cuff. This one is a little harder to prevent, but certainly not impossible (barring extreme bad luck, of course). Your rotator cuff has 3 parts (I won't go into details) Normally when you tear it rotator cuff during weightlifting, you just tear one of these parts.

If you tear more than one, it's either a freak injury or an accumulation of years of use and wear (usually sustained by older men. And by older I don't mean ancient but not men in their 20's) Benching heavy is the leading cause of this particular injury.

There are 3 solutions

Warm up by getting an extremely light dumbbell (5-10 lbs) and make circles with each arm, increasing the size of the arc until you're swinging your arms straight up and down. Now repeat in the opposite direction.

Don’t do less than 3 reps/set. While I can't stop you from doing it if you really want to, weight this heavy puts a big strain on those shoulders.

If you MUST do super-heavy weight, don't straighten your arms after each rep. Instead, go up until your arms are at 30-40 degree angle with your elbows. This isolates your chest more, shifting some of the pressure off your shoulders.

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