Feeling banged up in the gym or experiencing pain can be attributed to various factors. In this blog post we’ll discuss some of the common themes we see with recurring gym injuries:
Lack of Education
The majority of people neither understand movement, nor programming. And it’s largely to no one’s fault, since learning how to exercise is rarely taught. For example, we commonly hear that people ‘get hurt’ when they go to the gym more than X times per week. This can be attributed to a variety of factors including they’re unsure how to do a certain movement, they don’t know an appropriate weight to use or they don’t know how many sets of an exercise gives them the appropriate dose.
Other Lifestyle Behaviors
The way we conduct ourselves outside of the gym has a massive impact on how we perform in the gym. Poor nutritional patterns, insufficient sleep, dehydration, poor emotional health, unmanaged stress and more can influence your body’s ability to perform physical tasks.
Misunderstanding the Role of Recovery
You’ve likely heard the unfortunate slogan, ‘no pain, no gain’. This slogan suggests that in order to get results, you need to work at an extreme intensity all the time. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Think about this: humans need 7+ hours of daily sleep in order to function optimally. We need this EVERY DAY, which suggests that recovery is a vital human need. The same goes for training. In order to carry out the demands we ask of ourselves in the gym, we need to make sure that we are recovering in between training sessions. This means ensuring you have proper programming week over week and month over month. This ensures that your training intensity varies so you stay feeling fresh and not burnt out. If you feel like you got hit by a truck every time you leave the gym, you’re overdoing it. Those are the folks who typically find themselves cycling through months of going hard and months of quitting. The net result is either zero or negative.
These factors discussed above are challenging to manage. Each individual is different and requires different strategies. This is where an individualized training program and coaching can be extremely beneficial.
