Staying injury free while participating in physical exercise is important for your performance. Whether you’re participating in competitive team sports such as football or athletics, following a gym exercise programme or training towards a personal goal such as completing a marathon, unfortunately … injuries can occur!
Injuries can have a short and long term effect on your performance. By identifying signs and symptoms, and implementing preventive and appropriate action, this can determine injury recovery time.
Below we have listed some key principles, which will assist you in preventing injuries:
Warm Up & Cool Down
Ensuring your body is prepared for the exercise ahead, is essential in injury prevention. Performing a warm up prepares your body for exercise by increasing your respiratory and heart rate, increases blood flow, which increases delivery of oxygen and nutrients to muscles, increases your bodies muscle temperature and loosens tendons, ligaments and joints.
After exercise, ensuring your body returns to a pre-exercise state is also essential in injury prevention. During exercise, your body performs several stressful processes. Muscle fibres, tendons and ligaments are damaged, and waste products build up, increasing the risk of blood pooling. To prevent Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS), which is pain felt for a few days after exercise, an appropriate cool down containing stretching, is applied.
F.I.T.T Principle
Frequency (how often do you exercise)
Intensity (how intense is your exercise)
Time (how long is your exercise)
Type (what type of exercise you perform)
FITT principle should be the core of any exercise session or programme for two reasons:
1) Adapting your training and ability according to your fitness level to achieve maximum results
2) To reduce the risk of Overtraining and causing injury
Overtraining
Overtraining occurs when a person experiences stress and physical trauma from exercise quicker than their body can repair the damage. Recovery is a very important component regarding injury prevention. While placing your body through specific exercise or training, improvements only occur during times of rest. Without appropriate recovery, whether it is physical, mental or emotional stress, you run the risk of overtraining, which can result in injury.
Stretching & Flexibility
Stretching helps to improve exercise performance, which decreases the risk of injury and muscle soreness. Stretching can improve range of motion, reduce DOMS, and fatigue. Applying appropriate stretching techniques, depending on the exercise performed, is just as important.
*Disclaimer
Our therapists provide injury treatment, advice, prevention, and rehabilitation exercises through sports massage, deep tissue massage, exercise programming and physiotherapy.
We provide educational content for informational purposes only. Aways seek a medical professionals care and advice regarding injuries.