Mar09How You Can Avoid Overuse Injuries
1. Work on your technique-If you want to get the most out of an exercise while minimizing bad stress on the body you need to lift properly. The best way to do this is to hire a personal trainer. At the very least use a trainer for a couple of sessions to get the basics down. Never sacrifice form for weight.
2. Listen to your body– When your body speaks LISTEN! If you start to feel shoulder pain and discomfort coming on then take a break of pressing movements and build up those back muscles. It never helps to push through any pain your body might be having.
3. Get balanced-The shoulder tends to be one of the most injured areas of the body when training. The fact that most people tend to do too much bench press, shoulder press and pushups and not enough back exercises just makes the problem worse. Start doing a 2-1 ratio of back pull to push work. We also tend to see the knee caving in on exercises such a plyo jumps and squats. This is generally from an imbalance of the adductors and abductors. Make sure you work the muscles like the glute medius of the hip to ensure you do not develop this imbalance. Quad dominance versus glute/hamstrings is another issue that people need to work on. If you continue to ignore these imbalances you will eventually have problems.
4. Be smart with your stretching– Use good techniques to reduce muscle tension and improve rang of motion. It is key to perform dynamic stretching moves in your warmup before exercise and static stretching afterwards.
5. Take care of your muscles-We always recommend getting massages at least one time a month. You need to get work to take care of those adhesions in the muscles in order to reduce injury and improve performance. Foam rolling daily before exercise is another useful tool to help with this as well. If you are serious about getting results then you should be serious about tissue work.
6. Change up your exercises-If you always do the same movements in the same order you will increase your chance for overuse injury. Focus on changing angles, grips, and exercise order. If you currently rely heavily on machine exercises you might want to use more free weights. Machine based movements ( especially isolation ) work the muscles in one fixed movement pattern which can lead to joint issues.