Keys to Injury Prevention

There's nothing like that sinking, oh sh*t feeling that you get when you feel a sharp pain in your knee when doing a quick change of direction, or that twinge in your lower back on a heavy deadlift day. Or maybe you're someone who has been slacking on the exercise front, and you've finally made the decision to start being more active only to find yourself with new aches and pains, and you feel like this "positive" change isn't so positive after all. Whether you're an elite athlete, a weekend warrior, or just a girl trying to get her 10k/day steps in, at some point, most of us have experienced exercise-induced injury and it sucks.

Someone wise (probably a textbook from uni) once told me that the best way to treat an injury is to prevent it. It's a pretty simple and logical statement, but unfortunately, more often than not there is little emphasis placed on injury prevention in the fitness world and too many people end up on my treatment table because of it.

Now, not all injuries are preventable, and there will always be factors that are outside of our control. That being said, there are more factors that we CAN control than we can't, and today's post is going to dive into what I think are the 5 most crucial pillars to injury prevention. Let's get nerdy. (seriously tho, this is content heavy #sorrynotsorry).

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1. Specific Warm Up

The key here is SPECIFIC. What activity are you warming up for? Which muscles need to be firing for optimal performance? The majority of your warm-up should be tailored to initiating the movement patterns that are required for the activity you are about to do. For example, if you are about to go for a run, your warm-up should be targeting the glutes, gastroc, soleus, hip flexors, & trunk in both forward and lateral movements thereby turning on both the muscle groups and movement patterns dominant in the activity at hand.

A few other benefits also include:

• Increased nerve conduction rate

• Increased release of oxygen into the tissues

• Increased thermoregulatory strain

• Increased metabolic rate

• Increased blood flow to the muscles

• Increased preparedness & positive psychological effects

I know that the warm up is easy to skip (heck, I even brush past it sometimes), but it is so important and only needs to be 5-10mins long to be effective! So make the time, be specific, and prepare your body for what you're about to do.

2. Appropriate Training

This is a major point that we could dive DEEP into but for the sake of keeping this concise we will stay surface level and say you need to gradually increase your load - too much too fast is the main culprit for so many injuries! What this means is that you need to find the "sweet spot" in your training AKA you need to load your tissues enough to create adaptations but not too much to cause injury! Let's break this down:

• Understimulation = not enough load. Without adequate stress on your tissues & energy systems, your body will not create adaptations and therefore your capacity will not increase.

• Overstimulation = too much load. When you do too much too fast, your body will not adapt fast enough leading to pain during and after workouts and eventually to overuse and/or traumatic injury.

• "Sweet spot" = adaptation. Appropriate stress & stimulation will increase the body’s capacity to sustain mechanical stress without injury while also increasing its capacity to do more.

3. Symmetry Matters

I can't stress this one enough: You NEED to train the less dominant/opposing movements to whatever the primary movement is in your activity of choice. This is especially important for those of you who are training for a specific sport or mainly do just one type of exercise. For example: If you love cycling, but all you do is cycle 5x/week with no other strength or cross-training, you are going to become very quad & hip flexor (front thigh) dominant, while the opposing muscles in your glutes and hamstrings get left behind. Anytime you have an imbalance of strength in muscles that create opposite movements, you are at risk for injury because you begin to alter the forces acting across the joint leading to all sorts of compensation patterns!

The moral of the story here - if your sport involves a lot of repetitive movements in one direction, on your off days spend time training the opposing movement patterns to create symmetry & prevent injury from imbalanced forces.

4. Adequate strength & motor control

We will keep this one short & simple: Do you have the strength to be doing what you're doing? Again, we will use running for example: If you start running but do not have adequate strength in your gastroc, soleus, and glutes you will pull from other muscle groups, place stress where your body is not created to hold stress, which will ultimately lead to injury.

How do you know if you have the strength required for your sport/activity? I'd place a bet that if you are starting something completely new, you probably don't. Do some research, get assessed by a physio, and figure out what exercises you should be doing to prepare your body to withstand the stresses of your activity.

5. Recovery

Last but not least, you've got to let your body RECOVER. Under recovery leads to progressive fatigue and underperformance. Our bodies are pretty resilient but they are not invincible and need time to repair to perform.

A few major keys when it comes to recovery:

• Rest and sleep (should be getting 7-9hrs a night)

• Nutrition and hydration (drink yo water)

• Cool downs (active recovery after exercise for 5-10mins)

• Relaxation & support (gotta support your mental health too)

• Physio (we help people ;))

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Now I know that was a lot (even though truthfully it barely scratches the surface), but I hope everyone was able to take away a few pointers that you can apply to your training to avoid injury and keep moving upward and onward towards your fitness goals!

As always, thanks for tuning in - can't wait to continue to share with you guys next month!

Happy Moving,

C