How to Stay Injury-Free?

Injuries can hamper many a fitness routine, so don't let it happen to you. Stay injury-free with these top tips.

Even minor injuries can cause interruptions to your training routine and sometimes, once you stop, it can be hard to get going again. Worse still, if you’ve spent time and effort establishing your fitness routine and are used to enjoying the results of this effort, an enforced break can make you feel that you're going backwards rather than forwards.

Advice for beginners

One of the most common causes of injury for beginners is over enthusiasm. No matter how long some people have been inactive for they make the mistake of thinking that, now they've made the effort to get started with exercise, they need to get complete results immediately. So they get carried away, exercise for too long, at too high an intensity, and the result can be a variety of aches, pains and strains. The other cause of injury for beginners is poor exercise technique. Even relatively moderate exercise can be dangerous if it's done incorrectly and any minor misalignment can be magnified with the increased pressures and forces exerted on the body when you work out.

Your first few visits to the gym should be very gentle. The purpose of these visits is to get to know the environment and to understand what your body is capable of. Once you're familiar with the equipment and the routine of exercise you can increase the intensity of your workout safely week by week without interruption to your programme. Training progress relies on regularly pushing your body a little beyond its usual abilities and then allowing it to recover stronger. Push on too much too soon and you'll soon find yourself back where you started.

Getting the technique right with your exercise is so important that you'd be wise to invest in a session or two with a personal trainer for some detailed advice targeted at you and your objectives. Get this right at this stage and your exercise will always be as effective as you'd like it to be. Ignore correct technique and not only do you risk injury, but you also risk prolonging the results you hope to experience from your exercise.

Advice for intermediate exercisers

For intermediate exercisers, common causes of injury are increasing your training load too quickly or thinking that you're capable of diving straight into any form of activity, simply because you're succeeding with and enjoying one form of exercise. Indeed, if your training in the gym is going well, it doesn't necessarily mean that you can load up the weights in BodyPump or go hell for leather in a Spinning class, so take care if you try something new.

All exercisers should be continually raising the bar with their activity levels; this is how you keep your body challenged in new ways and ensure your good results keep coming. However, the rule of thumb is that you can increase the amount you do, either the training quantity or the intensity of your training, by roughly ten per cent each week. This allows your muscles, bones, joints and connective tissues to develop in a balanced way.

Different activities also put different stresses and strains on your body so if you are going to try a new class or sport, always begin at a low intensity.

Advice for advanced exercisers

Advanced exercisers usually become advanced because they love to feel the benefits of being active. However, distant as it may seem in the minds of many, overtraining is a real possibility and a serious risk factor when it comes to getting injured. Overtraining is when you do too much exercise without sufficient recovery time and the result is that exercise progress slows and you may even feel that your fitness is reducing. At the same time, the desire to exercise and the enjoyment that getting active brings may gradually wane.

As motivation and focus on exercise decreases there is an increased risk of accident or injury. Another risk often faced by advanced exercisers is poor nutrition. When you exercise a lot, you must ensure that your body is allowed to refuel efficiently, which means eating the right quantities of the right variety of nutrients, vitamins and minerals. A diet that is insufficient when it comes to replacing lost energy and repairing fatigued body parts is a high-risk strategy when trying to stay injury-free.

Advanced exercisers need to take at least two full days off activity a week and in some cases they may need to take three or four days off. As they are likely to work hard during their exercise sessions, advanced exercisers need to make sure their bodies have an entire day or two to recover before putting themselves under further stress. Fewer workouts with full concentration, total commitment and proper time to recover will lead to a long, successful and injury-free exercise career.

This post written by Kashif Raza, currently, he is working for a website which offers the latest medifast coupons 2012 and BistroMD coupon. Medifast is an effective weight loss meal replacement program and BistroMD is a great solution to healthy dieting.

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