Exercise caution during workouts
Use common sense while working out so that you do not put yourself at risk of injury.
EXERCISE is essential to good health. But if you don’t use common sense while working out, you’re putting yourself at risk of injury.
As a primary care and sports medicine specialist at Rush University Medical Centre, Dr Kathy Weber sees first-hand the injuries that can result from overdoing it or not using proper form during physical activities.
Here, she offers advice for safer workouts.
Common injuries
Exercise-related injuries are commonly overuse injuries, such as stress fractures, muscle strains, patellar tendinitis or rotator cuff tendinitis, and illiotibial band syndrome (a hip disorder from injury to the thick band that runs from your hip to the outside of your knee).
Basically, any activity that involves repetitive movement – running, cycling, hitting a tennis ball, swinging a golf club – can cause damage to a specific area or areas of tissue over time.
Injuries can also occur when you’re not properly conditioned for a certain type of exercise, or when you return to an activity too quickly and don’t give your body time to adjust to increased levels of activity.
Always start out slowly in terms of both the duration and the intensity so your body has time to adapt. You should gradually increase first the amount of time and then the intensity level of your workouts.
Depending on your level of conditioning when you get started, you may do only 15 to 20 minutes per workout the first week or two.
After you’ve built up your endurance and have a great baseline, then you can start to work out at a higher intensity. If you do a gradual build, you’ll be a lot less likely to end up with overuse injuries.
Also, make sure that you’re giving your body a sufficient recovery period between activities. Recovery time should always be individualised. Initially, a day or two in between exercise bouts should be adequate, but make sure to listen to your body.
Clues that you are not allowing enough recovery time may include continued muscle soreness and/or fatigue. If you try doing high intensity workouts seven days a week, the risk of breaking down and sustaining an injury is high. Your body needs time to recover and rebuild.
No pain, no gain?
It’s true that you might experience a little muscle soreness from exercise and feel achy the next day. But pain is always an indicator that something is not right.
If you have pain that’s not going away on its own, and if that pain is affecting your quality of life – including your ability to participate in physical activities – you should get it checked out.
When we say “no pain no gain,” we’re talking about Olympians and high level athletes who are really pushing hard to achieve and excel and be competitive.
For everyday folk, “no pain no gain” shouldn’t be the mantra. You should feel like you worked out hard, but you shouldn’t feel like you have to sit down because you just killed yourself.
Most strains heal on their own within four to six weeks. But for instance, if you’re at the gym and you tweak your shoulder, and it’s still bothering you after a couple of weeks of rest and ice, make an appointment with an orthopaedic specialist.
Don’t try to tough it out, and don’t engage in activities that may make the injury worse. Of course, if you’re exercising and you feel something pop and have immediate pain or swelling, or if you hit your head, you should see a doctor right away.
Workout programmes
People assume that if there’s a hot new programme that everyone – including celebrities – is trying, it must be the best programme. But what’s right for one person isn’t necessarily right for another.
You’re given a DVD featuring someone who is supposedly an expert in their field, and you’re trying to mimic the exercises with no supervision. No one is telling you if you’re doing everything correctly; you’re just following a DVD.
But what you need to keep in mind is that there are some exercises people with certain conditions shouldn’t do.
For example, if you have knee problems, you may not want to do exercises that are high impact or require you to twist your knees.
If you want to try a DVDbased programme, try not to do the whole DVD the first time.
Start out doing 10 to 15 minutes at a lower intensity, and if an exercise doesn’t feel comfortable or you’re not sure about the proper way to do it, skip that particular exercise.
Gradually increase the amount of time you spend on the workout. Once you’re able to do the whole DVD at a moderate level of intensity, then you can start to increase the intensity.
We all want toge tin shape and lose weight yesterday, but as we get older, it takes more time for the body to adapt to changes. You have to think of exercise as a life-long pursuit – it’s a marathon, not a sprint.
Go for variety
The key is doing a variety of exercises – asking your muscles to do some different activities and working different muscles in your body, giving specific muscle groups breaks.
Also, your programme should include flexibility, strength and aerobic components. That’s extremely important.
If you’re stronger, you’ll have better endurance and be less likely to sustain injuries.
People like to do activities at which they excel. There are patients who are very flexible and do not need to work on their flexibility, but they are drawn to activities that require greater flexibility, like yoga, because they are good at it.
Then there are people who are very good at aerobics, and that is all they want to do; they do not want to lift weights. But they should be doing some weight training because fitness is really about balance: You need to have good flexibility, good strength and good aerobic conditioning to optimise your body’s overall condition. – HealthNewsDigest.com