Training for Life. Living LIFE! Going through the journey performing highly and feeling great. Certainly a worthy goal. Undoubtedly a great challenge. How in the world do we accomplish this objective? What’s the single most important consideration in such a quest?
Not getting injured. Avoiding, within reason, injuries and all their associated factors is the essential task. So we can train, play, and compete without interruption.
Let’s start with accepting the reality that we will never be able to prevent every injury. It’s just a part of life, of being human, and we just can’t eliminate all possibility of injury. We can’t live in a bubble and we shouldn’t try to. But we definitely can reduce the risk, and severity, of many injuries. And that, my friends, is totally worth the effort.
This brief article is going to explain the two main negative consequences of injury and then rally on a positive note by discussing the two major preventative applications.
First, let’s get the bad news out of the way. Injuries take you out of the game and cause deconditioning. And, if the injury is serious enough, you generally don’t come back completely at 100% of pre-injury level. We’ll explain those points a bit.
Any injury that causes you to reduce, modify, or avoid training (over any time period greater than a few days) will lead to a conditioning loss. This is especially true in the case of injuries you deem serious which last weeks to months, and even more so when surgery is involved. Of course, we always do our best to work around the problem, use the best rehab science available, and minimize the deconditioning impact. But the fact is, downtime is associated with losses.
What makes this injury-invoked deconditioning so sinister for Lifetime Athletes is the comeback trail. The older you get – and also with every injury you accumulate – the harder it is to come back to your prior, or goal level of fitness. It just gets tougher and tougher and even the most motivated athletes can not only struggle with this process, but come up a bit short. These injury-related obstacles are not always insurmountable, but they often mandate acceptance of lower output capacity.
The other slice into our high-quality, athletic life from the double-edged sword of injury is tissue disruption. Any injury more than a very minor one will lead to scar tissue infiltration. This is also true of every surgery. It’s important to remember that surgery is an injury in and of itself that repairs you but that’s generally not quite as good as your original (pre-injury) status. Scar tissue has value but the problem is that it’s neither as extensible nor as strong as original tissue (muscle, fascia, tendon, skin, etc.). Thus, the goal in rehab is always to minimize scarring. That’s why the therapeutic process is so important, because it augments the body’s remodelling capabilities at the injury site.
This is why, at a tissue level, you don’t come back to 100%. Sure, you might feel 100% and be able to perform at 100% in some instances, but that is due to the brilliant human body’s ability to substitute, compensate, and adapt. Yet, under a microscope, your tissue might only be 94.6% (arbitrary figure here) of its prior integrity level. These are insults that we don’t want to pile up. We can withstand a few, but less is better.
So we accept that injuries are bummers that have undesirable effects. But how do we minimize their occurrence and improve our outcomes when the s**t hits the fan? We recognize that there are some traumatic injuries which are completely accidental in nature and just can’t be predicted or prevented. Bad luck, if you will. We’re not talking about those. We are focusing on most overuse, and some traumatic injuries, which have the potential to be avoided or lessened in severity.
It all comes down to two things. Consistency of training and intelligent progression of workload.
When you train consistently, as in most every day, you are frequently exposing your body to the stimulus which leads to adaptation. This occurs across multiple systems and structures but there are two places where this is paramount in preventing injury: tissue integrity and motor skill enhancement.
Tissue integrity is durability. Regular training promotes muscle protein synthesis, bone density increases, collagen and elastin deposition, and cellular augmentation to enable your body to more effectively produce, resist, and recover from…force. As long as program design is relatively solid – or comprehensively awesome like in our App’s Training Tribe Annual Plan – your consistent training gives your body a higher threshold against failure. You’re less likely to blow something out when that tissue is more durable. And a well-conditioned beast will always, always, bounce back quicker than a couch-surfer.
Motor skill enhancement is exactly what it sounds like. Movement is a skill and an art form which is meant to be practiced. The more you work on your movement, the more refined it becomes. More economical. More efficient. Better recruitment of the appropriate muscle fibers. Less wasted energy or extraneous “noise” in the system. Less stress on the joints and shocks to the muscles and tendons. Motion that is more graceful, poetic, and easier on the body (as well as the onlooker). When your motor skills are dialed in, movement is familiar and comfortable to the body. Less chance for a nasty surprise.
The intelligent progression of workload, as opposed to the simplicity of motor skill enhancement, may actually be more complex than it seems. It would not be out of the ordinary to assume that workload progression, or the application of volume and intensity in your training, is simply a linear process that looks like a 45 degree upward sloping line on a graph. However, the reality for the dynamic human organism is that this line should have numerous peaks, valleys, and plateaus. In other words, there can be carefully applied escalations along with planned regressions and maintenance phases. We need to design training to both fit the individual and to address the necessary capacities (strength, speed, power, agility, and endurance). But we must constantly adjust it in regard to goals, seasons, and recovery status.
We have to be careful that our training doesn’t cause injury itself (by being less than intelligent in its application). And we need to make sure that we customize our training so that it optimally prepares us for what we need and want to do in life. This of course means your chosen sport(s) but also a variety of other work and life demands. In this sense, training for LIFE is also training to minimize injury risk and severity.
If you’re feeling great, performing highly, and rarely getting injured…you’ve already got this stuff figured out. But if that’s not the case, here are a few suggestions. Feel free to take these with the proverbial grain of salt.
In our first scenario, let’s say you’re the type of person who prefers to hit the gym, or do a workout of any type, 2-3 days per week. This practice historically worked well to keep you fit and healthy. But these days, you seem to experience frequent injuries. It’s probable that your body is not getting enough sessions through the week to properly adapt. You could get away with that a decade or two ago, but not now. My recommendation is to increase frequency to 5-6 days per week of training. This would be via the addition of low-intensity recovery-based sessions which increase the regularity of stimulus Lifetime Athletes need, but at an absorbable level. Off days (more than 1-2 a week) hurt Lifetime Athletes. Light, but more regular training is your secret to success because it elevates your tissue durability and overall training tolerance.
Another common situation is the highly motivated individual who trains almost every day but seems to always be struggling with one chronic problem or another. You’ve got the frequency and consistency thing going well, but you are probably under-recovering. Your tissues are in a constant state of partial repair. This is a weakened state and they are never able to make the desired adaptations. In this case my suggestion is to keep that all-important regularity but only have 1-2 relatively high workload (volume and/or intensity) days per week. Make the other workouts slightly briefer and easier. Keep fine-tuning this process until you feel your chronic soreness and nagging injuries begin to disappear.
How about the person who doesn’t move well? This could be in only one or two areas or it could be global across most movement patterns. You might be cognizant of this or you could also be inadvertently unaware of movement dysfunction. You don’t want to be that guy or gal but sometimes it is true. Remember, having difficulty with motion doesn’t make you a bad person. We need to stay away from any thinking that is condemning or discouraging. If movement is uncomfortable, particularly the more it becomes uncomfortable, you’ll be motivated to seek a solution. If performance is suboptimal, or movement is painfree but feels/looks strangely awkward, that might necessitate a checkup with a physical therapist, coach, or trainer. For most of us (including yours truly), there may not be a “perfect,” but there certainly is a “better.” The key in all of this is identifying the deficiencies and addressing them with the appropriate corrective exercises and associated training elements.
What if you love your sport and prefer to do only that? You might be a runner, cyclist, swimmer, golfer, etc. Doesn’t matter and all those lifetime sports are fantastic. But you refuse to perform supplemental, body-balancing conditioning. Ironically, it’s the ancillary stuff that keeps your body functional and actually allows you to keep doing your chosen sport for life. In some ways you may already be a student of your sport. Technique, training methods, gear, etc. Again…all good. But also take a look at some of the known problematic issues of single-sport (and training) focus and explore the offsetting strength, mobility, and capacity-related exercise that helps you to maintain lifetime mechanical competency. It might only add up to minutes per day in addition to your sporting pursuits but it will invariably add years to your ability to enjoy said behavior.
The final example we’ll discuss today is the fitness enthusiast who is understandably influenced by the magnitude of training information with which we are currently inundated. One longevity guru emphasizes Zone 2 cardio. A very popular media influencer suggests that any training not targeting hypertrophy is a total waste of time. A women’s health thought leader tells you to do sprints. It’s hard to know who to believe, what to choose, and how to put it all together. A lot of these folks end up bouncing around from one method or class to another, often experiencing a fair amount of injury and frustration. I like to use a financial analogy. Fitness is like money. You have to be wise with your investments. This means choosing the methodology that actually works best for your body type and personality, and then being patient with the process as the interest (fitness and training knowledge) accrues.
Any of these conditions can benefit from expert guidance. That’s why we have thousands of evidence-based resources available in The Lifetime Athlete App. And when a member needs to work one-on-one with a physical therapist, coach, and trainer…we have Personal Coaching Consultations to take the guesswork out of injury prevention, performance training, and lifelong health and fitness. This is the solution to not getting injured. And that’s the single most important consideration for Lifetime Athletes!