Pushing Past Plateaus and Avoiding Injuries
Whether you are a runner, a weight lifter, play a specific sport, or just exercise to be healthy (the list goes on) every now and again it is important to change up your fitness routine or add different styles of training in the mix. Most people are creatures of habit and will fall into the same workout style because it is what they like to do, myself included. I want to say that there is no issue with finding your passion (I am truly an advocate for that), but different training styles should be utilized to achieve maximal results (avoid plateaus) as well as an injury prevention technique.
With that being said I have seen far too many people become stagnant in their exercise routines. It is important to utilize different exercise styles; use of the right training styles can supplement each other to achieve greater performance.
Tips for avoiding injury and avoiding plateaus:
Get a trainer to assess your movement patterns. Movement compensations generally correlate with overactive and under active musculature. Knowing what muscles are tight and what muscles are weak can be extremely beneficial when trying to prevent injuries. Using techniques like stretching, foam rolling and active release on the overactive muscles, and adding in exercises to strengthen the under active muscles can help to further avoid injury, and allow you to perform better and more consistently.
Utilize cross training. The goal of cross training is to enhance overall performance by adding in exercise techniques that will help to benefit within the specific sport. I.e. most runners use cross training to become stronger to improve their weak points to increase running performance. Another example is powerlifters; well-conditioned powerlifters often utilize metabolic conditioning exercises (high work rate in a short amount of time) to help improve the fast twitch muscles worked during their compound movements to achieve greater strength adaptations.
Plan your goal out in phases. What this means is that you have to work up to your goal, you can’t just go from zero to one hundred percent right from the get go because you’re going to burn out quickly. Start at a certain intensity, duration, workload etc. and gradually build up from there. You don’t need to be the best, just work toward being the best you can be.
Try new things. Maybe you’ve been eyeing up a certain area of the gym to see what’s going on, or have a friend that’s asked you to go run stairs; just go for it, get out and try new things and maybe you’ll find something else that you love. There is no harm and trying something new, even if you hated it at least you tried. There are so many ways to be active and live a healthy lifestyle so don’t hold back!
