Davor Kontic - Personal fitness trainer
So you decided to join your local gym and sculpt your body fit, you hit your workouts hard, all out, puffing and pounding through different exercises. You arrive home feeling a bag of aches. Your shoulders are in pain. Next morning you cannot lift your arm above shoulder level, your back is stiff. What a disaster! You head to see your local Chiropractor. He says you have strained your rotator cuff muscles plus you have a pinched nerve in your lumbar region, proceeding to give you an adjustment and advising you to lay off exercise for a month...So you give up your quest for fitness. In order to avoid or minimize a sports injury, I will try to point out important aspects of your workout.
Here are 7 Tips To Stay Sports Injury Free...
Find an experienced trainer
First of all, talk to an experienced trainer, she or he will help you choose the right activity for your mind & body type and your level of conditioning. In general, if you are a novice coming back from a lay off, a 3 times per week program, every other day, addressing the core muscles (such as CX worx from Les Mills group fitness or similar) will give you a good foundation for an injury free progress - whether you choose to lift weights, run a marathon, engage in a combat sport, dance yourself crazy or enlighten in the sweaty bliss of a yoga class or you just want to look and feel good-in which case I suggest you add tons of laughter to you routine.
Warming up
Secondly, make sure your body and mind are warmed up for the workout ahead. 5-15 minutes of a whole body warm up before your workout should do the job. Get those first grains of sweat on your forehead. Loosen up your joints and give them a chance to start releasing synovial fluid to ease friction. Slowly elevate your heart rate and get into some heavier breathing. Be nice to your body; do not torture it with deep stretches right from the start. Easy and fluid is the key.
Advertisement
Do it the right way
Learn to do your exercises biomechanically correct. Have an exercise professional guide you and teach you the correct way to do an exercise. Proper form, posture, control, breathing, the right amount of intensity for your level.
Stay away from risky exercises which load your joints in an unnatural or high impact way.
Work on your weaknesses
If you look at your body as a chain, identify weak links in your chain, they are the ones that are prone to injury, work on strengthening them.
Tip: Weak links are hidden usually in the excises we hate to do.
Advertisement
Don’t overdo it
Doing too much, too hard, too often, too long, especially if it’s in a wrong way, is an open invitation to injury. As a novice, our spirits are high and our will is strong, we want results fast, but our body has not gone through a 1-3months period of anatomical adaptation to the activity or exercise at hand so break it in gently into your new routine. No need to push yourself like a maniac right from the start. The key is to stimulate not annihilate. The crash course mind set might work for preparing for an exam but in a fitness activity it will more often result in an injury than not and you giving up altogether. Limit your workouts to one hour per session, 3-4 sessions per week.
Rest
Get enough rest each and every night, try to get that sleep between 10pm and 2 am, it is a period when true wonders occur in our bodies, an array of hormones are secreted which promote repair and rejuvenation, altogether 7-8hours of sleep and if exhausted squeeze in a half hour nap during the day.
Listen to your body
Learn to distinguish between muscular pain or the burn, which is normal, and those twitchy unnatural pains occurring in your joints or parts of the body and avoid exercise which causes them. Listen to your body, even if a know-it-all professional trainer is trying to work you through an exercise for which your body responds to in an unnatural pain causing way, stay away from it, no matter what your trainer says. Listen to your body.
