The FitRehab Podcast, Episode 2: 4 Tips To Safely Improve Your Fitness
Discover 4 essential tips to safely improve your fitness and avoid injuries. Don't cheat the warm-up, embrace progressive overload, and more!
Also available on Amazon Music and iHeart
Happy New Year! ‘Tis the season for New Year Resolutions. If one of your resolutions is to improve your fitness and overall physical activity levels, here’s 4 tips that could help you avoid injury while doing so.
Now, these four tips that I’m going to cover may seem obvious but you might be surprised about how often they are overlooked or forgotten altogether. So, to help you start 2024 off on the right foot, I’m going to walk through those four tips right now:
Tip Number 1: Don’t Cheat the Warm-Up
It may be tempting to get right into the workout to save time. But this is a very important part of the workout as it transitions your body from a resting to active state. It does not have to be long, about 5-10 minutes is often sufficient enough. But DO NOT cheat the warm-up. Doing so can increase your risk for developing avoidable aches and pains. Warm-up in all planes, long enough (again about 5-10 minutes should be enough time) and make sure it’s challenging enough to gradually increase heart rate, body temp, and blood flow from your resting to active state. Another good tip is to use the warm-up as a time to complete the same exercises without weight that you’re going to be adding weight to later in the workout. For example, complete bodyweight squats in the warm-up if your workout calls for dumbbell squats later on. This provides you the opportunity to ensure that you are comfortable with the movement, balance, and coordination that are needed to safely complete the exercise before you make it more difficult by adding weight. Lastly, completing these same movements without any additional weight prepares your muscles, tendons, and ligaments for those stresses that you will be applying later on in the workout. This can save you from developing tendonitis and/or from spraining a ligament.Â
Ok, so moving on to
Tip Number 2: Progressive Overload
Both improving fitness and creating lasting change require you to accomplish small progressive challenges over time. Neither fitness nor behavior change are overnight sensations. They require consistency, honesty with self, and continuous re-evaluation of how things are going. Going from zero (AKA sedentary) to 100 (full-throttle) in hopes that you’ll see results sooner only increases your risk of injury and burnout. Start small and build from there. Continue tweaking as you go along. For example, when an exercise feels as though it’s becomes too easy, look at that as having accomplished a step in your journey as that is a sign that your fitness has improved and you are inching closer to your goals. Then, either make that exercise more challenging. For example, let’s say you want to tone your hips and legs. If you’re starting from not having engaged in much exercise prior to now, jumping straight into full bodyweight lunges and squats might be too much stress on your knees and hips at this time and cause unnecessary aches and pains that could end up slowing your progress and motivation. Instead, secure a chair behind you and stand up and sit down for the reps instead of doing full squats . Then, as you feel your strength improving after a few sessions, try either only tapping your backside against the seat (so you’re not fully sitting down) or, if you feel you’re ready, take the chair away altogether. Tweaking exercises and progressing them over time introduces your body to sufficient stress that is necessary in order to improve your strength and fitness, but does so at a pace that allows your body time to stay caught up. If you progress too fast, your body will likely be left behind and, eventually, will begin yelling at you in the form of tendonitis and/or sprains. Save yourself from these nagging injuries that could end up slowing down your progress by remaining patient and consistent. Start small and build from there.
Tip Number 3: Complete the Compound Movements Before Isolating the Joints and Muscles
Compound movements refer to multi-joint movements. So, these include squats, lunges, chest press, push-ups shoulder press, etc. etc. Let your arms help with the chest press and your glutes with the squat before they’re fatigued.
And lastly,
Tip Number 4: Stress It Then Rest It
This ties into the second tip in that you must allow your body time to stay caught up. You do this through resting the muscles and ligaments after stressing them. Rest worked muscle groups for at least 2-3 days between sessions. This amounts to working each muscle group 2-3 days per week. Remember that you won’t likely be sore the day of but rather not until 2-3 days after. Allow your body time to catch up. I laid out recommended guidelines for training the major muscle groups in a free one-page document that I call the Physical Wellness GamePlan. I went in-depth explaining guidelines for developing an effective fitness program as well as the Physical Wellness GamePlan on the prior episode of this podcast. The title of that episode is Guidelines to Crush Your Fitness Goals.Â
So if you would like to learn more on how to schedule your workouts with appropriate balance between stressing and resting so that you get your desired results, I recommend you download the Physical Wellness GamePlan (for free) and listen to the prior episode on this podcast. I will include the link to download the Physical Wellness GamePlan in the description for this episode.
So there you have it. 4 tips to help you avoid injury as you work to improve your fitness.
Just to summarize as we wrap up today’s episode:
Number 1: Don’t Cheat the Warm-Up
Number 2: Progressive Overload
Number 3: Complete the Compound Movements Before Isolating the Joints and Muscles’
Number 4: Stress It then Rest It
These steps are all written out for you in detail on my blog so that you can quickly refer back to them whenever you need a refresher. I’ll also include the link to this in the description for this episode as well.
Lastly, if you found this episode helpful and haven’t already, I’d greatly appreciate you giving me a follow on Instagram as I work to grow my community of people that I can help through my skill set and experience.Â
Thank you for reading this blog post. This blog is a service of Optimal Living Solutions under the alias "FitRehab". The information in this blog is not to be substituted for physician consultation, evaluation, and/or treatment. You are advised to consult a physician before you undertake any physical exercise program. If you experience any chest discomfort and/or abnormalities in your heart rate or breathing, stop exercising and consult a physician immediately. Optimal Living Solutions makes no guarantees with regard to outcomes you will experience from information provided within this blog, including but not limited to, resolution of pain and/or symptoms, the amount of weight you may gain or lose, or the rate at which such weight loss or weight gain will occur.