The moment you take your first step towards your fitness journey, injury becomes much more a reality and let me tell you, it can be devastating and crippling to you achieving your goals, consequently be a major set backs.
Along with an injury comes a slew of side effects associated with it, one prominent one is depression, despair, which ultimately can lead to you "giving up".
How It Happens? Fitness related injuries are usually caused by severe muscular imbalances, that means a muscle optimality is hindered by another by either being too tight or not tight enough. The conditions in which your muscular system is required to perform also matters, for example, the optimality of a ballet dancer wont match if placed in a football setting. Such injuries NEVER occur suddenly (of course there are exceptions), but rather an accumulation of imbalanced movements overtime that your body is no longer able to properly compensate or to "make it work".
What Are The Signs? There are ways your body can warn you in advance to let you know its movement patterns are executed under compensated terms rather than optimal terms. Muscle knots, weird muscle tightness, muscular cramps (especially during exercise or movement), slow muscular reaction time (affected performance) and odd pain at your joints (due to tight muscles pulling on their respective joints). Your body is really good at making things work but unless it is under optimal levels, it can only do so for a limited amount of times, that time can be years, months, days, or sometimes few minutes.
What Can You Do? The concept of no pain no gain is a dangerous one to follow, if anything you must stop and evaluate what could be wrong if you feel unusual pain. Stretching is a big one! You must restore muscular balance by relaxing overactive muscles (tight ones) and working on underactive muscles (too loose). If you workout or lift weights or do anything remotely related to fitness, you will always create muscular imbalances, meaning you will be forever bound to keeping up with stretches...proper stretches because which ones matters. Allow your body proper rest as it does help you deal with underlying knots and muscle tightness. Stay hydrated as it will provide enough suppleness and reduce possible muscle tears. Seek professional help, there is no doubt being watched over by a fitness professional makes injury alot harder to happen.
What If You Are Injured? If you happen to still develop an injury despite your efforts to avoid it, seek counsel with your fitness professional before doing anything fitness wise (you might make things worst). If that is not possible follow the simple rule of "if it hurts, stop and try a different route". If that is not possible then you are forced to put your fitness on hold until the pain is no more, only then may you resume your journey.
Should you need help to get you started, contact us HERE or drop us an e-mail to alistaireNF@gmail.com and let's make that step towards your fitness journey TOGETHER!
