Exercise Injury Prevention Tips

Exercise injury prevention should be right up there with lifting, eating, and all the other things you have to do to build muscle.

Yeah, knowing how to avoid injury when lifting weights is pretty important.

See, there’s a difference between hurt and injured.

When hurt with an ouchie, you can still push through the pain.¹

An injury is something else.

Whether it’s from something traumatic like blowing out your knee by trying to squat too much fucking weight or from something cumulative like being a genius and still doing skullcrushers despite weeks of serious elbow pain, getting sidelined with an injury blows. That’s time you have to take off from training a muscle in order for it to heal.

That’s lost gains, dammit!!!

And we can’t have that!

Nope, not at all!

That’s why preventing some of the most common exercise injuries should be a priority for everyone, no matter their training experience, because a muscle doesn’t grow if it isn’t regularly introduced to loads that force the body to adapt. And because going to the gym kinda sorta helps make that happen, it’s imperative that you keep your ass in the gym.

So how do you prevent injuries and keep your ass in the gym?

Look at you asking the tough questions!

<eye-roll emoji>Well, I don’t know, but I have a sneaky suspicion that these tips might be a start!</eye-roll emoji>

WARM UP

Taking the time to warm up before working out helps drive blood to the muscles, making them more flexible. What this does is reduce the all too real possibility of them splintering into a million fragments like the liquid nitrogen covered T-1000 Terminator.²

Do as you please with what your prep consists of, whether it be cardio, light weight training, or dynamic stretching. What you should be aware of though is that the best kind of warm-up is the kind that involves performing low-intensity versions of the exercises that make up that day’s workout.³ Also, keep your warm-up short (5-10 minutes) instead of doing like many of these doofuses who spend waaaaaayyyyy more time rolling around on the floor on a PVC pipe doing their prehab bullshit than they do actually working out.

WORK ALL THE MUSCLE GROUPS

Spend as much time and effort training the D-list muscles as you do the major Hollywood ones. The reason for this is simple. Besides going a long way to make you look proportionate, preventing muscular imbalances helps lessen injuries and other issues by stopping the agonist muscle from overpowering its weaker opposing antagonist.

In other words, for example, if you ignore your rear delts but do a shitload of pressing movements for the front delts because you mistakenly think that’s how you get boulder shoulders, the odds are high that you’ll eventually have bad posture, pain in the rotator cuff, or some other shoulder problem, if you don’t already.

TRAIN LEGS

Hate leg day? Do it anyway!

Strengthening the posterior chain can go a long way to preventing knee and lower back pain.⁴

On top of that, evidence suggests that training the lower body has positive carry over in upper body development, as well as increasing post-exercise lipid oxidation and the post-exercise metabolic rate, both of which are kinda good things if you’re interested in burning fat.

LIFT WITH PROPER FORM

Don’t sweat the technique?

How about you not taking your lifting advice from Eric B. & Rakim. It’s not the fucking Reagan era!

Correct execution of exercise movements can help minimize the risk of strains, sprains, and totally snapping some body part in half or completely rending off an extremity.

But you like living life on the wild side, huh? Well, since you do this fitness shit for vanity purposes, consider that the use of proper form by contracting the target muscle — and nothing else — to actually lift the weight and move it through a full range of motion can also result in greater gains.

DON’T OVERTRAIN

A lot of people, especially newbies, are in the gym all day every day. It seems almost intuitive that the more frequently you work out the more results you’ll see, but that line of thinking is the furthest thing from the truth.⁵

WARNING: Reading on may very well give you flashbacks to when you found out that Santa Claus isn’t real.⁶

Contrary to popular belief, the body doesn’t grow in the gym. It does that OUTSIDE, where it recovers and repairs itself to become stronger as a defensive response to it being beaten down by the workouts (were they intense enough). Placing continuous stress on the body and not giving the joints, bones, and muscle, as well as the nervous system, ample time to recuperate is a recipe for disaster. Some of the results of overtraining include sickness, general fatigue, disturbed sleep, and appetite suppression, loss of motivation, decreased strength and endurance, and impaired movement and coordination, all of which play a role in injury or missing time away from the gym for other reasons.

The best way to stop overtraining from happening?

You mean, besides never working out at all?

Well, you can take a rest day, cut workout length to no more than an hour and learn how to work out more efficiently, maintain a proper diet (and supplement regimen), schedule adequate amount of rest for a body part before you train it again, and plan breaks at least every six weeks to either deload or take time off.⁷

STAY WITHIN LIMITS

Thou shall not ego lift!

Handling more weight than you can manage is very much related to the use of proper form. It presents itself in the excessive swinging of the entire body to perform an exercise movement, a common sight in any gym across the land. This not only robs you of gains as the body recruits other muscles while the target muscle bears less of the workload, but over-the-top body English increases the chance of torquing something that shouldn’t be torqued.

What’s too much fucking weight?

Too much fucking weight is when you can’t control the weight on the concentric part of the lift without the use of momentum, pause for 1-2 seconds, and then exhibit control of the weight as you return it to the starting position.

Can’t do that shit?

Then the weight’s too fucking heavy! You’re not the love child of Superman and Wonder Woman, so lighten the load!!!⁸

LISTEN TO YOUR BODY

Pay attention to what your body is telling you.

Learn how to read it so you know when

(1) you shouldn’t do what you’re about to do because you’re about to snap some shit up

(2) you’re just being a pussy looking for a way out

Yeah, you have to push yourself out of your comfort zone, but don’t be a dingbat.

Be smart about it!

HIRE A PERSONAL TRAINER

If you stop being cheap and thinking that you know it all, a qualified fitness professional (someone like…ummmmm…ME!!!) will help you reduce the risk of injury by demonstrating an exercise movement and giving you the cues to perform it properly, with them then providing correction as they watch you perform the exercise yourself.

BONUS

Pay attention!!!

Behind flying off the treadmill and faceplanting on the ground because walking and running in place is such a difficult task, number 2 and 8 on the top ten list for gym-related hospital visits is exercise machines and free weights, respectively. People have a high rate of injury using all three types of workout equipment for a variety of reasons, but the one they all share in common is people simply not paying attention to what they’re doing, such as getting distracted by a hot babe sauntering by as they’re reracking a weight and then dropping the plate on their foot.

Instead, focus on what you’re doing at all times and get your perv on later!

I know your mom is an expert of all things, but weight training isn’t any more dangerous than whatever physical activity she’s begging and pleading you to take up instead.

In fact, weight training is safer than many sports. The risk of injury is also lower than that for running or cycling on the side of the road because you’re under the delusion that motorists are supposed to share the road with you.

The audacity of such a thought!

Anyway, while weight training is safer than a bunch of shit, that doesn’t mean that you can’t fuck yourself up though.

When you do fuck yourself up, the road to recovery is a long one. Not only are you out of the gym losing the muscle and strength you worked so hard for, but the time spent on the sideline is time lost not making any new gains.

For many people, coming back from an injury and seeing their body not perform as it once did can be very trying. It often leads to frustration and decreased drive to work out, resulting in them just calling it quits. That’s why preventing exercise injuries is so important.

Maybe it’s just me, but with the tips I was just kind enough to give you, you should be able to do just that.⁹

But that’s just me!

Glossary: barbell, cardio, diet, exercise, exercise equipment, fitness, glutes, gym, intensity, lifting form, motivation, muscle, rest day, results, squat, squats, treadmill, work out, workout

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Monster Longe

Monster Longe is a personal trainer in San Diego. He has been lifting weights for +25 years and training clients in the gym and online for about half of that time. When not working with clients or making content that's easy to read, understand, and apply to everyday life, he enjoys long walks and leaving buildings crushed and entire city blocks decimated in his wake.