3 tips for exercising safely
Welcome to the weekly warble here at Ideanthro Movement where this week we're talking about...
3 TIPS FOR EXERCISING SAFELY
This one's for you if you've ever (a) tried to exercise but hurt yourself; or (b) want to start exercising but are concerned that you might hurt yourself (maybe because you've heard that lifting weight with poor technique is dangerous etc).
Here we go!
1) LEARN GREAT TECHNIQUE
This one's a cliche but that's because it's really important. Your body is incredibly resilient. It can put up with a lot of bad movement before things start to go wrong (i.e. before you get sore). Having said that, there are definitely movement patterns (techniques) that it much prefers over others and that it finds much more resilient than others.
The somewhat annoying fact is that if you live in the Western world (i.e. all the people who come to our gym, because we're in Australia!) then you don't currently move with a good technique as you could (tight areas, sore area etc) and hence when you first come to exercise, you're unlikely to move with great technique. For this reason, even if you don't intend to train with a coach forever, it really does pay dividends to get some help with technique at least initially to set you on the right path. And if you're not able to work with a coach, then be your own coach. Watch respectable coaches in YouTube, film yourself doing the movements and compare. It's not perfect, but it's far better than moving without any feedback.
2) CHALLENGE YOURSELF BUT NOT TOO MUCH
This one is all about hitting the sweet spot. To become fitter, your exercise must challenge yourself enough to stimulate your body to adapt (become stronger, more flexible etc). If it's a complete walk in the park, there's no reason for your body to adapt. On the other hand, going too hard isn't a great idea either. When you go too hard, you almost always start to loose your good technique, as well as risking leaving yourself unnecessarily sore the next day which, contrary to popular opinion, is neither necessary nor a badge of honour.
In an ideal world, the majority of your training should be around a 6 or 7 out of 10 difficulty. Yes, there's definitely space to be higher or lower some of the time, but the vast majority should be a 6 or a 7.
3) PICK REAL HUMAN MOVEMENT PATTERNS
This one is related tot he first one, "Learn Great Technique" but it's not the same. Whereas learning great technique is about learning to do whatever exercise you're doing correctly, this one is about pikcing the right patterns.
As a human, there are movement patterns that we evolved to perform really well. These include walking, running, jumping, throwing, climbing, crawling, throwing etc. The common feature is that these are all complex movement patterns using the whole body in a coordinated fashion. What we didn't evolve for is to spend lots of time don't contrived, isolated patterns using only small portions of the body at the time (e.g. curls, leg press etc). When we train is this isolated way we gradually program our bodies to loose their natural, coherent movement patterns and to move in a rigid, isolated fashion. If you've ever seen a bodybuilder walk you'll know what I mean. It's stiff and rigid. It doesn't look coordinated or athletic, despite what their muscles would suggest! This is not desirable if you don't want to spend your life feeling stiff and sore.
So instead do this. Pick the sorts of movements that I mentioned above (running etc) and get the majority of your training from them. Learn to do them really well and then limit the isolated movements to supplementary work to fix specific weaknesses etc. That is far more likely to keep you feeling athletic, supple and generally pain free.