How To Reduce Muscle And Joint Injuries And Pain

Injury Prevention Program: How To Reduce Muscle & Joint Injuries &
Pains

by Jon Dyson

How To Boost Your Anti-Injury Genes

How effective are your anti-injury genes? Are you constantly suffering from aches
and pains in your joints, muscle pains or even worse? Do injuries hold back your
fitness program and sporting activities? Join the club. It’s a big club. But you don’t
have to be a member.

To help you opt out, here are some simple injury avoidance methods that will
improve your training and reduce muscle and joint injuries. That way you don’t
waste time in rehab or sat on the sidelines.

Only those amongst us who are genetically very fortunate who also manage to live a
charmed and lucky life can hope to escape some kind of muscle or joint injury.
Otherwise, the rest of us live in the hope that we won’t get injured too often, not too
badly and not at a crucial time.

Nasty Side Effects

It’s helpful to keep in mind that injuries can have more nasty side effects than at first
thought. Here’s my little list:

1. They hurt.

2. You lose training time.

3. Your fitness level goes backwards.

4. Painkillers can easily become part of your diet.

5. You sit on the sidelines.

So far, there’s not much fun here. In fact, it’s downright frustrating on the
sidelines. But look out! Here are 5 more effects of fouling up your fitness:

6. You may have to pay for unused gym time.

7. Injuries accumulate if you refuse to allow yourself to recover.

8. Treatment can take up a heap of your time

9. Medical costs eat into your bank balance.

10. Injuries can have knock-on effects on your everyday life. For example, when I
had to wear a support collar for several months it was impossible to drive. And even
a short trip by bus was hell.

And Don’t Forget These

11. After rehab it takes time to get fit again. So don’t rush to catch-up your lost
fitness or you’ll be back on the sidelines PDQ.

12. Some injuries are career-killers.

Crossing Roads With Your Eyes Shut

Given how commonplace injuries are, you might expect that serious precautions
would be taken to avoid them. After all, you wouldn’t intentionally stroll across a
busy street without taking at least some care, would you?

So, it’s ironic that membership of gyms and fitness clubs has never been so high, yet
at the same time the suppliers of painkillers and supplements - along with
chiropractors, surgeons and physiotherapists - have never before done such brisk
business.

Dominant Fitness Orthodoxy Problems

But how surprised should we be by this when the dominant fitness ‘methodology’ is
to spend hours on so-called fitness apparatus and lifting ever-heavier weights?

Don’t get me wrong about this. The explosion of gym membership is tremendous.
Yet the massive over-reliance on weights and so-called fitness apparatus is bound
to have a price. In fact, there are two prices. And the second might even affect
more people than the first. The second is that the use of typical fitness equipment
generally involves such a mind-grind of repetition that many normal people just give
up.

Now it’s one thing to learn how to avoid injuries the hard way by getting hurt first.
But it’s much, much better to learn the easier way by taking on-board some very
simple ideas instead.

My THREE Top Tips

The really neat trick is to minimise the chance of injury altogether. But what is the
best way to do this? Here are three top steps:

1. Regularly use what I call ‘Switch-Sessions’ in your training. These are workouts
quite deliberately varied from your normal routines. They will give you better all-
round fitness and simultaneously help to prevent overdoing any part of your normal
routine.

2. Avoid dangerous exercises. Sounds obvious. But time after time I see this
ignored in the gym where muscle fitness is sacrificed for muscle bigness.

3. Ease-off the weights and machines. In fact, I reckon you can become fitter both
faster and safer without them at all. Bodyweight exercises are best. Unless, that is,
you have a sneaking ambition to become a muscle-monster.

Here are a few more:

Don’t ignore little aches and pains. If you do, there’s a strong chance they’ll become
big aches and pains if you refuse to allow yourself to recover.

Don’t be too crazy, lazy or careless to alter or pause your training when something
hurts. To scare yourself, forget about pro-athletes, just count up the number of ‘fun’
runners, football players, judo enthusiasts or weight lifters you know who’ve been
forced to quit with bad knees.

If something hurts, stop doing whatever makes it hurt. For sure, this can be very
frustrating if you are in the middle of training for an event. But carrying on will risk
more than just a contest. It risks a whole series if you refuse to allow yourself to
recover.

Avoid covering up pain with drugs. ‘Pharmacy-Fitness’ can and does become a way
of life for too many athletes. And it can lead to even worse injuries if you refuse to
allow yourself to recover.

In reality, a tremendous amount of injuries originate in training. This is why your
injury prevention program needs to be thought out in advance if you want to save a
tremendous amount of time, aggravation, pain and disruption. Unless you are
superbly endowed with anti-injury genes, it’s worth paying a lot of attention to this.
Getting fit with forethought doesn’t hurt.

So, get your hindsight in advance - not last when it might be too late.

JON DYSON is the founder of http://www.faster-safer-fitness.com/ and author of
'The Fitnessblasting Manual' and
'Dangerous Exercises Exposed!' More info here on dangerous exercises. For FREE
Fitnessblasting course click here now.

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