How to avoid injuries in the gym and train for longer
Injuries are an annoying part of the training journey, I am sure you have picked up a few from your training, or just during your time alive. Injuries do not always occur within the gym.
Walking down the road and misstep: Rolled ankle.
Went to play a game of netball and played without warming up: A Pulled muscle.
Tried to catch yourself whilst falling down: Sprained wrist.
Strength training can help prevent the likelihood of these everyday life injuries occurring. Strength training can also help fix the injuries you have sustained which is why it should be a staple in your life, whether that is solo sessions, classes, online coaching etc. However, injuries can be sustained from strength training.
Injuries can be put into two categories, acute injury, and chronic injury. Depending on the category and severity of your injury will determine how you go about treating it in the short and long term.
Acute
An acute injury is something that is instantaneous.
Take a misstep and roll your ankle.
Catch your finger between a weight plate and bruise the finger.
Trying to lift a weight you know is beyond your limit and pull a muscle.
Depending on the action, the injury can be quite severe. When in the gym it is not often your injury is acute. There are situations where the injury occurs straight away, and these situations are very painful. Muscles and tendons are very strong and resilient, it takes a lot of force to cause damage to them, however, it is not impossible.
Example: You might see an acute injury in the gym is when lifting a weight you know that is way beyond your capability. Yes, you need to overload the muscles, but progressively, hence the name progressive overload. This should ideally be in 2-5kg increments (exercise dependent). If you are jumping weights up 20kg+ at a time then the likelihood of you sustaining an acute injury is much higher.
When recovering from an acute injury the worst thing you can do is complete rest (excluding bone breakage) you should encourage some movement in the affected area within a comfortable range, and do not try and ‘push through the pain’. Movement requires bloody flow, blood flow carries oxygen and restorative nutrients. As time progresses you should be able to move in bigger ranges with minimal discomfort. You want to keep working till the discomfort you feel is gone.
Chronic
Chronic injuries are either injuries that occur over a period of time or can be referred to as recurring injuries.
Lower back pain from years of manual labour.
Pain around the knees from all the runs you went on without warming up a little bit.
Neck pain from sitting at a desk for so many years and not exercising.
It is near impossible to pin down the direct cause of chronic injuries as there tend to be multiple factors that come into play. But you should not wait for the injury to become debilitating/painful before you act on it and decide to take steps to help. Rather the continual feeling of discomfort should be your trigger point to act.
There will be days when you wake up and joints and muscles don’t feel right. I wake up with this sometimes too. I follow a guideline where I give it a week, if a week has gone by and I am still feeling the discomfort then I take steps to fix the problem.
Injuries can come about not just by a mistake from lifting weights, but also through your lifestyle, training frequency and modality. If you are someone who likes to hike on the weekends or enjoys going for runs then there is a high likelihood that you will suffer some form of knee or ankle joint pain due to constant loading of that joint for long durations of time. If you are someone who likes to go hard in the gym 5 days a week then there is a high likelihood that you will come to face with some muscle discomfort due to high levels of work constantly being placed on the muscles in repetitive motions.
Training Tactic
Training can be a tool to help with the prevention and the rehab process of an injury. Having an online coach can be a major benefit in this element as they take the thinking away from training and adapt your plan in a way that allows you to do the activities you enjoy. How this is done is by a process called tapering. When you taper you are essential programming in periods in your training where you either reduce the intensity you work at or reduce the volume (weights lifted) during your sessions that week.
What tapering does is allow your body more time to rest and recover but still allow you to train and keep up your routine without completely resting.
Example: You have been training hard for the past 8 weeks and every week you have seen improvements in your back squat by a minimum of 5kg a week. You come to the eighth week of training and the weight is starting to feel a lot harder than it usually does. That is your sign to incorporate a taper/deload the following week. This taper could see you reduce all weights lifted that week by 50% and the way to still make the session challenging is to either increase the reps and sets or use tempos to keep the session challenging to some level.
Adding in a taper is extremely effective not only for recovery purposes but also performance. After a taper, you will most likely see improvement in strength when you get back to your usual training volume and intensity as you have allowed the body to rest, recover, and adapt to the previous stressors.
Training can cause an injury but it is also the best way to prevent and recover from an injury. Injuries occur during movement, being strong and capable in different ranges of movement will be the best tool to prevent you from becoming injured as well as keeping the joints strong and supported to prevent deterioration of the bone and chances of tendon damage.
Recovery Tactic
Alongside the use of tapers, you can also place rest days within your week to allow you to be in a better state for your next training session, hike, sporting event, etc. If you take part in activities on the weekend then aim to place your toughest session furthest away from that. By doing this you are going to be able to perform both the training session and the event to the best of your abilities as there is a substantial gap that will allow time for muscle soreness to be resolved. If you do something outside of the gym midweek then still employ this same tactic, aim to do your most challenging session at least 2-3 days prior to the event you take part in.
If an injury has occurred the best means of recovery is to keep moving and continue to train around the injury. You want to encourage blood flow to the injured limb as well as continue to strengthen the uninjured sides as there has been shown to be an analgesic effect on the injured limb. Complete rest will not solve the issue and perhaps may delay the process. Rest for a time period but do not allow it to completely derail you.
Conclusion
Injuries are inevitable, the only thing you can control is the extent of the injury and the process behind how you recover. You will experience small aches and pains through training, but training will also be the answer to these issues. Extreme injuries should be seen by a physiotherapist as they are equipped with the knowledge to help you and advise you on the next steps to take in terms of who to speak to and how you can get back into training.
I hope this helped.
Till next time,
Myles
