Avoid injuries from weekend workouts
It may seem like just yesterday that you were hanging out with friends, playing basketball or soccer every week. Then life happened.
Now, a job and a family gobble up your free time, leaving you few hours on Saturdays and Sundays for your athletic cravings.
Welcome to the world of the “weekend warrior.”
You’ll find them in weight rooms and on softball fields, jogging trails and tennis courts. Getting exercise is better than the alternative — doing nothing. But the life of the weekend warrior brings its own set of problems and increased risks for a wide range of injuries.
“It’s easy to get nostalgic and remember what it was like for you at peak athletic performance. And it’s natural to feel you can still do that. It’s just not realistic,” says Dr. Justin
A. Mullner, a board-certified sports medicine physician with Orlando Health Jewett Orthopedic Institute.
The most common weekend-warrior injuries fall into two groups — those that result from one event (sprains and breaks, for example) and those related to over-use (such as tendonitis in the knee).
What to do
Your workout doesn’t have to end in pain. Here are some tips to help prevent injury:
• Develop a proper warm-up routine.
• Stretch before starting your activity.
• If you feel pain, don’t push through it.
• Stay hydrated.
• Allow time for recovery, including a cooldown period after you finish.
Our bodies usually do what we train them to do. When you teach yours to spend a lot of time sitting, that’s what your body gets used to. It doesn’t respond well to sporadic
activity.
“Anything that calls for sudden bursts of speed or effort can put serious strain on muscles and tendons,” says Dr. Mullner, citing activities such as soccer, basketball and weightlifting.
If you get hurt, it may take more than those five days between weekends to heal. And if you smoke, have diabetes or are overweight, your chances of getting injured are even higher.
“The most important thing
is to understand what you can and cannot do,” Dr. Mullner says. “If you’re not putting in any athletic work during the week, you can’t charge into the weekend, expecting to go all-out. You’ll need to dial it down a notch.”