Friday, June 18, 2021

Avoid Injuries As Much As Possible While Maximizing Your Training

From a general perspective, we are taught to give it everything we have, even on the brink of injury or even death. It's easy to believe that if you push yourself beyond your maximum effort, you'll get results that will blow everyone's mind. That's not always the case. Pushing to the brink of failure in just about anything can cause more harm than good especially when it comes to exercise. Even the legendary bodybuilder Bill Pearl has talked about never training to failure.

Maximizing your efforts in training doesn't necessarily mean to keep going until you puke your guts out or pass out due to exhaustion, trust me I know what it's like to nearly black out during a workout and it's not a good thing for your body. The idea is to get the most out of your training without the need to kill yourself and avoid injuries as much as possible. This means, resting as long as needed which varies from person to person, working a set that has you hitting reps where you have at least 2-3 left in the tank but not going any further than that, keeping the body as relaxed as possible without causing too much tension and breathing with efficiency throughout the whole session whether in a rest period or in a set. 

Certain exercises do need a level of intensity in order to create the results you're looking for but it's also important to understand where to draw the line with that intensity. You have read about the level of speed to time ratio for Hill Sprints but let's recap that: To get the maximum out of sprint, you need to have a good solid understanding of how much of a percentage in speed needed for the duration of a sprint, it's an experimental thing but once you know how fast you need to go, it's incredible what comes out of it. Normally a 10 second burst would be as close to maximum speed as possible that you can muster which would be roughly 70-80% depending on your fitness level, it's almost impossible to maintain that speed if you were to do a sprint for 30 seconds because if you were to try that, you could get injured or hurt your CNS more than anything. A 30 second sprint would be around 30-40% of your maximum speed, it's still a hard sprint but you're maintaining the pace of the speed needed for it to get the most of that sprint. I'm not an expert on this, I'm just looking at it from a logical perspective so it may be different for some people. 

Rest periods are crucial for maximum results because it's going to come down to your recovery and having the quality of rest to be at your best for the next set. This varies from person to person as well because some people are so damn fit that they can go for a good period of time without needing a rest period but from a general perspective, getting the most out of set and resting as needed goes hand in hand. If you're doing mini workouts, depending on your fitness levels, you might need to rest less because the workout isn't that long say like 10 minutes. If you're doing workouts that take about 30 minutes to an hour or more, rest periods might be needed more because you want to get the most out of the workout. Not everyone is a pro athlete or a world class Olympian so you have to figure out what works best to get the most out of your workouts. If you're an average person but tries to do anything close to what a world class crossfitter or powerlifter does, it could kill you or put you in the hospital. Rest when it is needed, if it's too short, you're not giving yourself enough time to be efficient but if it's too long, you might have lost some of the pace you normally can do. 

We can't avoid injuries 100% of the time (hell even getting out of bed or sitting too long can cause injuries) but we can do our best to minimize them to get the most of what we want to achieve. Giving something 110% in a literal sense makes no sense at all because you might as well be dead or broken if you believe in that or do that overall. Put in the effort that gives greater benefit to the results than the risk of an injury, if risking an injury is higher than the benefitted results that would be good in the long run, that's the wrong kind of training to do. 

Be smart about your training and get the most out of it without getting hurt or worse.   

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