Gym injuries are common especially when you do the wrong things. The good side is that you can do a number of things to prevent the injuries from coming up. Some of the things that you can do are:
Reduce Overhead Presses
Excessive overhead presses have been shown to increase the likelihood of you injuring your rotator cuff. The exercises have also been shown to increase pain in the acromio-clavicular joint.
To avoid the injury, you should reduce the weight and instead increase the repetitions. For ideal results you should not engage in less than three sets of an exercise.
When doing the exercises you should ensure that both of your shoulders are pressing down in order to cushion your head. To ensure that your shoulders are in the right place, you should do the exercises while watching yourself in the mirror.
Warm Up
Warming up increases your heart rate and gets blood flowing into your muscles and as a result you prepare the muscles for exercises. Warming up also prevents pulling a muscle. To prevent injuries from coming up you should always warm up before you practice.
It’s recommended that you warm up for at least 10 minutes before you start your exercises. Some of the great exercises that you can engage in include: jogging, running and jumping.
Alternating Your Exercises
While it’s good to engage in routine exercises, it’s usually devastating as it puts you in repetitive stress injury. To avoid this, you should not engage in a single exercise when in the gym.
To be on the safe side you should alternate between cardio machines, work on cross-training, and try a number of fitness classes and weight machines. By doing this you will not only reduce the chances of you getting an injury, but you will also have fun doing it.
Avoid Holding onto a Treadmill
It’s common to find newbies holding onto a treadmill. This is because most of them are usually scared of falling off. Holding on the treadmill is dangerous as it puts your body in an unnatural running positing and increases the chances of you straining your back and shoulders.
To be on the safe side you should avoid holding onto the mill. If you find that the pace is too high and you can’t keep up with it, you should slow down to your comfortable pace.
Avoid Extreme Weights
Although, muscle growth depends on the load that you lift, you should avoid putting your muscles under a lot of pressure.
To be on the safe side you should start with small weights and then increase the load as you get fit. If you find that you are unable to lift a heavy load, you should save it for another day and lift the weight that you are comfortable with.
Listen To Your Instructor
A gym instructor is a highly trained person who knows everything about the gym; therefore, you should listen to what he/she has to say. If he/she tells you to avoid doing something, you should not do it.
This was VERY helpful, I tend to be a huge klutz and seem to hurt myself in some way or another pretty frequently when I work out. Not quite as badly on gym equipment though, but a lot when I was doing Insanity. I think it’s because the warm up you do in the videos is more of just exercising with 30 seconds of jogging in the beginning of the set, nothing else. I think from now on when I do it I’ll try the warm up tip here, I’ll make sure to jog for a longer period of time or something.
When I started to weight train I hired a personal trainer who made it a point to enforce to very important things, the first thing is to stretch after you warm up. Stretching the area you plan to work not only optimizes the workout- it also helps prevent injury. The second point is form- use the proper form when weight training, do not rush. Take the time to do it right and you will get the right results. There really are no short cuts, but if you stick with it you will see results.
I have been weight training for a few years now, haven’t had an injury. I think the most common mistakes are not warming up with light weights, using too much weight and not doing the exercises in proper form. You dont need to be an expert to do this things, if you’re just starting to work out, ask the gym trainer to show you around. Injuries are easy to avoid, but also easy to get. Also a great tip that I would suggest is just use youtube and watch videos on proper form and how to warm up, those really helped me up in the beginning!
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This was a really informative article. I think the best piece of advice someone should take from this article is Listening To Your Instructor. In August of last year I tore my meniscus in my knee while squatting incorrectly. I wish I would have asked for help while squatting from someone more knowledgeable than myself.