Working out is all about regularity. The fewer missed workouts the better. Suffering an injury while working out is a sure-fire way to throw a spanner in the works. It will curtail your progress and keep you in a constant state of frustration. Fortunately, you can avoid injury by following some common sense training guidelines.
#1 Improve Your Lifting Technique
Your lifting form is something that you work on over time. It is never perfect. Constantly work on having better form. Get on YouTube and study some of the best advice from the top coaches. Seek out articles on exercise form, especially the big lifts like squats, deadlifts, and presses.
There are many advantages to videoing yourself performing an exercise, especially on those complex moves just mentioned. Pause at relevant spots and check your posture. Are your eyes focused straight ahead? Is your back as straight as it should be? What are your knees doing when you squat? Are your heels staying on the floor? It may even be worthwhile to hire a personal trainer for a few sessions in order for them to help you to improve your workout technique.
#2 Stop When Something Feels Wrong
If you feel a strain or something unusual in a muscle, acknowledge it and give it attention. Don’t fall into the mindset of forging on regardless. Cut your losses and get out of the gym! Respect your body, give it time to heal itself and it will serve you for the long haul.
What about the old catch phrase “no pain, no gain?” Well, that expression needs to be read in context. When we speak of pain as an indicator of gain, we’re referring to muscle soreness, not injury. Lactic acid accumulation and muscle swelling are natural by-products of intense exercise. They indicate that the body is trying to repair itself. It’s important to recognise the difference between this kind of pain and the kind that indicates something’s gone wrong.
#3 Never Max Out on a New Exercise
New exercises create new demands on the body. You don’t yet know what to expect. So, take your time. Get a feel for the exercise. Ease in to it before you start pushing too heavily.
#4 Train for Progression Rather Than Pain
By thinking long term and training for longevity, you’ll be more aware of taking care of your body. Sometimes doing a little bit less is better than doing a little bit more. Don’t go into the gym to try and kill yourself. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t work hard. It means that you should go into the gym to make improvements – it’s the difference between training hard and training smart (and hard).
#5 Warm Up
Spend the first five minutes of your workout gradually building up your heart rate and loosening up your muscles and joints. Warming up takes your muscles from a cold, stiff state to a warm, flexible state. It has been proven that cold muscles are far more prone to injury than warmer muscles.
Warming up will also increase your performance coordination. You can warm up aerobically by running in place, jumping rope, or doing jumping jacks. Perform static stretches for the muscle groups that you will focus on during your training session.
#6 Strengthen Around Your joints
Strengthening around the joints will help to prevent over-use injuries due to repeated trauma to the joint. The best joint strengthening movement for runners is the body weight squat. When performing this movement, keep the weight on the heels, sit back just as if you were sitting in a chair, and don’t let the knees drift over the toes. For progression, hold dumbbells or do your squats on top of a Bosu ball.
#7 Ease into it
Build your intensity, frequency, and duration gradually as the workout progresses. Give your body time to acclimatise to the workout.
#8 Don’t Over-Train
There’s a fine line between listening to your body and wimping out of a workout. You must allow your muscles time to recover, repair and rebuild. By listening to your body, you’ll be able to recognise the signs of over-training – decreased motivation, constant thirst, halted progress, insomnia – and respond to them.
Every six weeks, you should take a complete week off from training. You should also consider taking at least a day off every week. If that’s not on your game plan, make sure that you are constantly mixing up your workout.
You don’t want to be doing the same movements every day. In fact, you need to give each body part a minimum of 48-hours rest before working it again. That way, it will have sufficient time to recover. When it comes to cardio, don’t do high intensity interval training every day.
#9 Train Your Back
A lot of gym goers spend a lot of time and energy training their chest muscles but not nearly as much on the antagonistic back muscles. As a result, the chest muscles often become strong and dominant compared to the back muscles.
Over time, that will lead to a hunched mid-back as well as to bringing the shoulder blades apart and internally rotating the shoulders. All of this makes the back vulnerable to injury. It also forces people to bring their head forward and to hyper-extend their neck. To ensure that upper body imbalance isn’t leading to back and neck injury, you need to include a full complement of strengthening exercises for your upper, middle and low back.
#10 Wear Proper Footwear
Shoes are a vital component of workout safety. You need a shoe that provides support for your foot. Wear an athletic sneaker that matches the type of workout that you are engaging in. Some sports shoes look awesome but may not be that functional for the intended purpose.
A raised heel may drive your toe to the front of the show, which could set you up for injury. You want your foot to be held tightly – especially through the middle region. You should also look for a shoe that has plenty of cushioning on the inside.
#11 Always Cool Down
When you work out, you strain your muscles and joints. Cooling down allows you to release that strain and return your body to a state of normalcy. It’s a vital transition between workout mode and sedentary mode.
Don’t let the rush to get out of the gym prevent you from engaging in a meaningful cool down. For those who have been weight training, this should include similar stretches to those that you began the workout with. If you’ve just done a cardio workout, slow jogging, jumping jacks, or skipping are ideal.
#12 Check Your Ego at the Door
The obsession with lifting heavier and heavier weight has made a lot of chiropractors very happy. The drive to get the weight up, regardless of how it is achieved, is a recipe for physical disaster.
Remember that your muscle doesn’t know how much weight is on the bar. All it knows is how intensely it is being worked. By dropping the weight and isolating the working muscle you’ll be working it harder, while making yourself far less injury prone. Focus on squeezing your muscles during each movement and feeling it working throughout the entire range of movement.
#13 Don’t Go to Failure on Every Set
If you take every set to the point where you cannot do another repetition, you will – over time – be placing too much stress on your system. Your form and the tension on the working muscle will also inevitably suffer. That doesn’t mean that you should stop when your muscles start to ache. That is actually the signal that it’s ready for the vital reps that will force it to grow.
You should be able to eek out two or three of those reps before you hit the wall. So, rather than going to actual failure on every set, go to technical failure; that is, the point where your form starts to deteriorate. Then, once every couple of weeks, have your partner assist you with forced reps to push beyond that level.
#14 Focus
When you are exercising with weights, you are operating heavy machinery. Imagine if you were operating a huge crane or an excavation digger. Are you going to allow your mind to wander, to get distracted by every hottie who walks past? If you do, the results could be disastrous. Same thing in the gym. You simply have to give 100% focus to the exercise that you are doing if you hope to avoid injury.
If you aren’t focused, you’re likely to simply cruise through your workout. Your form will be compromised and you will be at a much higher risk of getting hurt. You’ll end up feeling tired, your technique will become sloppy and your concentration will be out the window. And the further you progress into the workout, the worse it will become.
To stay safe – yet alone make progress – you must apply all of your concentrated effort to the working muscle. Nothing less than that will cut it.
#15 Save Your Knees
Knee injuries are commonplace among gym goers, and the majority of the time it comes down to one issue – locking out at the top of a movement. This is something that you should never do. When you lock out, all the resistance gets transferred from the muscle to the joint. This puts a whole lot of stress on the knees. The only exceptions are seated leg extensions and stiff-legged deadlifts. On all other movements (such as squats and leg press), stop just short of lock out.
#16 Workout with a Partner
A workout partner can be a great source of motivation and encouragement, but he can also be invaluable in helping you to stay safe. For one thing, he can keep an eye on your form, providing valuable and immediate feedback to help you to improve. He is also on hand to spot you lending that extra assistance when you can’t get the weight up on your own.
#17 Eat Right Post Workout
When you work out, you place a lot of stress upon your body. It’s only when you’re out of the gym that you’re able to rebuild, recover, and recuperate. It’s vital that you eat cleanly during that time period. Take in plenty of water both during and after the workout.
The 30-45 minutes immediately after your workout are the critical window for your post workout nutrition. Your muscles are craving the nutrients they need to refuel, recover and thrive. You need to take in both protein and carbs post workout. It’s a good idea to take your post workout meal in liquid form (i.e. a shake) as it will be absorbed into the bloodstream more quickly. Getting it right will help your body to recover, making it less susceptible to
#18 Slow Down
Most weight trainers perform their repetitions too quickly. By slowing down, you will be making yourself far less prone to muscles sprains and tears as well as joint injuries. At the end of each repetition, you should take a slight pause. Raise the weight to a count of two and lower to a count of four. In addition to helping to avoid injury, doing so will allow you to benefit more fully from the eccentric portion of the exercise.
You also need to ensure that you are getting sufficient rest between sets. Giving the working muscle two to three minutes rest between sets will allow it to recover just enough to allow for another full out effort. Any less than that and you are risking a muscle tear.
Working out, getting fit and having a great physique is a marathon, not a 100-yard sprint. By slowing down, learning to do it right, and taking the basic precautions outlined above, you’ll be able to train consistently year after year, without the frustration of suffering preventable injury.
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