Our individual goals may vary when it comes to exercise and living out a healthier lifestyle, but one thing remains the same regardless of what you are working towards – we all want to avoid injuries! So how can we get the most out of our physical activity and not be held back by a nagging injury? Proper preparation and a balanced muscular system is the key!
When building a car from the bottom up, there is a certain process that you must follow in order to create a finely tuned machine. You start with the foundation – the chassis – and build up from there. We need to approach our bodies in the same manner. In other words, we need to know our starting point. Your starting point, however, has nothing to do with how strong you are, but rather how much control you have throughout certain ranges of motion. We must identify any compensation patterns that your body has created over time and take them into consideration. If you attempt to “push through” a compensated motion you are only going to make the strong muscles stronger, and the weak muscles weaker. This will not establish balance, but further exacerbate the compensation at hand.
Once you have identified the imbalance due to the compensation, and have addressed the issue to achieve proper symmetry throughout your motion (the best method I have found so far is through Muscle Activation Techniques), you are then able to progress into some strength training. This still has to be accomplished carefully and very strategically. You need to progress by taking the smallest steps possible in order to allow your body to adapt to each new stimulus. An Olympic athlete has trained for years to perfect his or her sport and has taken the time to micro-progress from one workout to the next. They have gained control over every movement and know that their foundation (chassis) is capable of handling the forces that are placed on it. Do not try to accomplish Olympic style training without building up your foundation first. You will need to start with the basics. To be a master at something only means to have a deeper understanding of the basics!
As you micro-progress throughout each workout, we also need to be careful not to fall into a routine of doing the same thing over and over again. This is not to “trick” your muscles or to minimize the chances of “muscle memory”, but to ensure that your joints stay strong and healthy and do not wear out unevenly. This is an important aspect of injury prevention. Take for instance the tires on your car. Every so often, we rotate our tires to ensure that the tread patterns wear evenly on each tire. This will allow your tires to have a longer life and for you to have safer driving conditions. Your joints need to be treated in the same manner. If we constantly do the same thing over and over again, our joint will wear out. However, if we change our activity and/or positioning, the wear on our joints will be distributed more evenly throughout the entire joint surface and will last you much longer without experiencing the negative side effects of an injury.
By changing your positioning around, you not only help your joints, but you also allow your muscles to work throughout a different range of motion which will lead to a new progression. This new stimulus will provide a greater amount of support from our muscular system. We only have one set of joints, so we need to take care of them. We must strengthen the neuromuscular connection (how well your brain sends the signal to your muscle to contract) as well as the overall strength of each individual muscle, all while maintaining as much balance as possible! As we said earlier, if you try to work through compensation, you will only make it worse. We must attempt to create a balanced muscular system and micro-progress everything together as one unit.
Be sure to take the proper precautions to ensure that your muscles are working the way that they should be. One muscle on its own will not be able to do an awful lot when it comes to overall body control, but when that one muscle is accompanied by every other muscle, the resulted outcome of finely orchestrated movement is fascinating. We need to make sure that we can continue to allow our bodies to act in this way! Keep every muscle operating exactly the way it is supposed to. It will do its job very well if given the opportunity and support from everything else!
Injury prevention is not about what you are doing now, but what you have done prior to this point and how well you have prepared your body for the task at hand. As human beings, we like to push our limits. Just be weary of how far you push. The “one more…block…mile…rep…set…” might just be the one that forces you to go too far, thus leading to that injury we are trying to avoid!