With the new year comes the inevitable influx of people making resolutions to start more regular exercise, which is always brilliant to see and one to encourage. We all know that exercise is good for us, however, it goes further than just building muscle and helping improve our physical fitness. Exercise also helps support your immune system as well as having a positive effect on mood and mental health. Unfortunately, for some people who start on that journey, it comes to an abrupt end as a result of an injury and they are put off from further exercise. It’s something we have seen time and time again with patients in the clinic. Here are a few tips and things to consider if you have made that resolution to get more active, and hopefully help reduce that risk of injury.
Running is often a popular choice for exercise, it’s cheap and easy to do. Just stick on a pair of trainers and head out the door, right? But, are the trainers you are using appropriate? Something as simple as having a good, supportive pair of trainers can go a long way and make a big difference in how your foot interacts with the ground and how the rest of your body responds. There are places you can go to for proper running assessments (just call and ask us).
A proper warm-up is another vital part of the exercise and can help avoid injury. There are four elements to an effective warm-up.
- First, you need to loosen your joints. Start with some slow controlled movements such as rolling your shoulders, and marching on the spot to start moving those joints.
- Next, stretching. Stretches in a warm-up need to be dynamic rather than static, so move a muscle into that stretch position and back out in a continuous movement, for example, controlled leg swings forward and backwards to stretch hip flexors and hamstrings.
- Thirdly, start to increase your heart rate, star jumps or high knees are simple ways to do this.
- Finally, some sport-specific movements to start activating the muscles you’re about to use. Lunges are a great example of before running.
Something we see regularly issues with biomechanics, which have led to an injury. Our bodies are amazing machines and are designed to move in certain ways. If you don’t have the stability and therefore ability to control movement, the stress on muscles and joints can increase making injury more likely. To aid this we need to identify possible weaknesses and carry out specific strength work to help build the control needed.
You don’t have to wait to get injured before you do this, we are here to help with injury prevention as much as we are here to help with injury recovery and help enhance performance.
Recovery is an important part of training. You need to allow your muscles to repair and get ready for the next time you ask them to work. Not recovering properly can lead to muscle fatigue and weakness, which could result in our bodies not moving in the most efficient way increasing the risk of injury. We can effectively help our muscles recover from exercise with sports massage. Having regular sessions helps maintain mobility around joints allowing us to train and use the range of movement of our joints, as well as helping the muscles to recover from the effects of training and reducing delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS), the ache you get in your muscles after a workout.
We hope this has given you a good oversight into some of the things you can do to help prevent injury and keep you doing whatever exercise it is you have taken up.
