Guidelines for Injury Prevention
The most important action you can take to prevent injuries from occurring is to maintain your general health. Regardless of your age, your sport, your capabilities, or your “day job,” making a habit of taking care of yourself is the easiest way to ensure a long, joyful participation in your physical endeavors of choice. What follows are a few simple guidelines that you can use to keep fit, reduce stress, and avoid injury. Think about them, consider them, modify them to fit your life, practice them as best you can. Live healthy and play hard!
Listen to your body.
The human body is a miraculous, intelligent machine. It is capable of healing itself. It has the capacity to alert us to its needs. Sometimes the way it alerts us is through pain, fatigue, cold, fever, headache, malaise, and dysfunction. The purpose of this feedback, of course, is to show us that there is a problem and that we need to behave in ways that will prevent the problem from getting worse. The usefulness of these signals, however, is limited by our willingness to pay attention to them and to heed the warning signs.
Athletes, and particularly adult athletes, are often passionate about their sport. We see it in the adult dancer, who will do just about anything to avoid missing a class, or golfers who are out on the golf course each time they can get out there regardless of weather or how they feel. We see this dedication in all sports and in many athletes. How many of us have chosen to work out even when we hurt a little or had a headache or had some kind of an injury that we were sure would go away? We see kids push through pain all the time. This was something that we, too, could easily get away with in our twenties and thirties. But once the forties and fifties come our resilience changes. We are more easily injured and it takes longer to heal. In our mature years it is especially important to listen to the body.
Be smart with yourself: Heed your body’s warning signs. If you are particularly fatigued, skip your workout. If you are getting a cold or have the beginning signs of an upper respiratory ailment, don’t push your way through a tough class. Doing so may well have the effect of bringing on the illness rather than burning it out. If your lower body muscles are particularly sore from yesterday’s tough workout, stretch lightly and let them rest, even if you’ve planned to do a harder workout today. If you feel a bit of ankle soreness, don’t run the long run today; instead, wait a couple of days to make sure your ankle is in the best shape it can be. Work with your body, don’t fight with it.
Allow your body to rest when it needs rest. This is so very important. Practicing this one simple principle will go a long way in helping you avoid injury. Live in ways that let you continue to enjoy your body and your activities for a long time to come.
Warm up before you exercise.
Engaging in any sport or activity requires that our muscles be supple and elastic in order to move through the actions comfortably. Anyone who has engaged in any sport or physical activity knows how easily the muscles and joints can be injured when you aren’t sufficiently warmed up. Every dancer knows that there is no way you can do jumps before preparing the legs, feet, hips, and back with a complete warm-up. As we age our muscles grow less supple and resilient. They tend toward shortening and tightening, which places greater stress on the joints. Engaging in physical activity without sufficient preparation of the muscle leaves both muscle and joint prone to injury. It is particularly important to prepare our muscles prior to engaging in activity, regardless of the activity that we are about to do.
It is generally a good idea to take a brief walk to warm the muscles. In addition, gentle, generalized stretching prior to muscular activity is a wonderful means of preparing the body for the work it is about to do. I cannot overstress the importance of the word gentle here. The aim of pre-exercise stretching is not to elongate the muscles but to bring blood and fluids into the muscle.
With this in mind, then, move about, put your joints through mild range-of-motion activities, walk. As you ready yourself for your sport, prepare your body for the work you’re about to do, even if you don’t consider it work!
Practice proper technique for your sport.
Proper technique is so important!
The easiest way to injure yourself while engaged in any sport is to use poor technique. Conversely, the best way to prevent injuries during the practice of any sport is to practice correct technique. Whatever your sport, study proper technique from the professionals. Take a class, or take a lesson; read books; practice properly. When our muscles were young and soft and supple we could get away with “fudging,” but not any more. Now we really need to use our muscles properly. The rewards will be great—not only will your body work better, but your skill level in your sport will advance more rapidly than you can imagine.
Train throughout your day, not just during a workout.
A common piece of advice from fitness experts is that, in order to maintain optimal health, adults should engage in some form of physical exercise every day for at least thirty minutes. Between devoting hours to work and work-related activities; shopping, food preparation, cleaning, and errands to keep the home going; and hours devoted to the care of our children and /or our parents, there simply doesn’t seem to be enough hours in the day to do everything we need to do, let alone all of the things we want to do.
That being said, it is still very important to do some form of exercise each day. So how do we accomplish that?
Getting exercise every day is really much simpler than it might appear to be. If you consider the forms that physical exercise takes, we can have several mini workouts throughout the day. To excel in any sport or activity the athlete needs to cross-train; every athlete needs to stretch and to develop strength, aerobic capacity, and balance. Rather than thinking about a daily workout as a time requirement, think about training your awareness. You need to remember throughout the day that what you want to do is physical training, even if you are not able to engage in your chosen sport.
For training when your time is tight, try implementing a few of the following suggestions:
Air is your body’s first food.
Take in as much of it as you can!
Watch a baby breathe when he or she is asleep. You’ll see how the body is supposed to breathe. Watch how the entire rib cage moves easily and completely. It moves up and down and side to side. That’s showing you that the lungs are filling up completely and easily. The chest, belly, and back muscles are soft and elastic. Nothing is restricted. The breath is full.
You can do this while you’re awake.
Practice this in front of a mirror at first. What you see may surprise you. You may feel as though your body is inflating fully but you might see that only your chest is rising. As you correct yourself, you’ll get better and better at this full-body breathing. Practice is essential.
Breathing properly while you are at rest is the first step to retraining the body to breathe properly while you are engaged in activities: sitting at your computer, relaxing at dinner, or practicing your sport. When you have begun to breathe well you will start to notice that your stress levels can be reduced by taking a few deep breaths and allowing your muscles to release. Relaxed muscles move well. There will be a reduced tendency toward muscular injury. Your respiratory capacity will increase, allowing your physical endurance to increase. Your cells will be receiving increased levels of oxygen and all your bodily processes will proceed more efficiently.
You’ll feel better. Give it a try.
Enjoy a low-fat, high-fiber diet filled
with fresh fruits and vegetables and purified water.
We’ve all heard the phrase “You are what you eat,” but few of us actually consider what this really means. Its meaning is quite direct. Our body is literally comprised of the components we bring to it when we eat. Before you eat something, think about what ingredients it contains and what those ingredients bring to your body.
Foods to enjoy
Low-fat proteins: fish, chicken, turkey, lean cuts of beef and lamb, eggs, beans, nuts and seeds
Grains and whole-grain products: oats, brown rice, barley, buckwheat
Fresh fruits and vegetables: organic fruits and vegetables are highly recommended when available
Olive oil
Foods rich in omega-3 fatty acids, such as wild cold-water fish and flax seed
Foods to limit or eliminate
(The rule of thumb: If you can’t pronounce it, think twice about eating it!)
foods containing preservatives, additives, chemicals
fruits and vegetables grown with pesticides
meats from animals raised with hormones and antibiotics
artificial sweeteners
foods containing high percentages of processed sugars and flours (including certain breads, cookies, cakes, and snack foods containing primarily processed ingredients)
hydrogenated oils; trans fats; saturated fats
Eat and drink properly (and enough) for your sport.
Try to eat and drink in sync with your workouts. Think about the demands that your sport is placing on your body and try to consider what and when you eat in order to meet those demands.
Thirst is not necessarily a measure of need. This is particularly true during exercise. My son’s high school wrestling coach told the boys that “urine should be clear and copious.” Perhaps it shouldn’t always be clear and copious, but certainly once a day your urine should be clear. Dark yellow urine is urine that is highly concentrated, possibly indicating dehydration. Drink water throughout the day and pay attention to the color of your urine. It’s not a good idea to concentrate your fluid intake into just a few hours of the day, so spread out your fluid intake throughout the day and early evening. If the need to urinate frequently wakens you from sleep, reduce your fluid intake after dinner; balance that with increased fluid intake during the day.
Generally speaking, approximately 64 ounces of fluid from most sources taken throughout the day should be sufficient. However, if you are engaging in vigorous exercise the following hydration guide is recommended:
Within two hours before vigorous activity, drink 16 to 24 ounces (two to three 8-ounce glasses) of water. (Hikers, particularly those who are hiking in hot or dry climates, are often advised to “camel up”—to drink as much as one quart of water within an hour of beginning their hike.)
During activity, 4 to 8 ounces of water should be consumed approximately every thirty minutes.
To increase fluid absorption, drink water that is approximately 40 to 50 degrees Farenheit in temperature. This will increase the rate at which the stomach empties, and the water will become absorbed into the tissues faster than warmer water.
Rest and sleep in the name of muscle repair.
Sleep is so important; it rejuvenates. So is rest, and by rest I mean allowing the muscles that you use for your sport to relax and repair themselves. Let your muscles heal between workouts. Muscle repair requires time. In the best of circumstances, twenty-four to thirty-six hours should pass between heavy workouts or classes to allow muscle repair. Deep repair takes place during sleep; make sure that you are getting enough. For the average adult, seven hours’ sleep is generally adequate.
If you find that your body is fatigued, or you are having a particularly difficult time physically, respect the moment and the need. Let your body rest. Don’t push yourself too hard. Other days will come in which you will be functioning at a higher level. We all have cycles. Accept all parts of those cycles—the highs and the lows. Pushing yourself during a cycle of fatigue is one of the most common causes of musculoskeletal injury during exercise.
As adult athletes we may not be able to perform seven days a week, like we did when we were kids. Our bodies might not want us to play ball all day Saturday and Sunday, or to play three sets of tennis followed by eighteen holes of golf on a day off. If you recognize this truth and act on it before your body alerts you to the reality by getting hurt, you will be much happier in the long run. Take a day off in between workouts. Let your muscles rest and heal. Practice one sport a day rather than several. Take one dance or martial arts class, or two classes at most in a given day, and let your body rest for the remainder of the day. If you are a gardener, which involves very hard work, don’t do heavy planting or spring clean-up in the morning and expect to be able to function well physically in the afternoon. Pace yourself. This is very important.
Give an injury time to heal.
Nobody likes to admit it, but all athletes at some time or another become injured. It is a sad truth that as we get older our bodies are more easily injured, and those injuries tend to be worse than when we were younger and tend not to heal as rapidly as they did then. You can see this even in your daily life. In your twenties when you had a cold it went through your system in three to five days. In our mature years a cold can take five to seven days to make its way through the body. Bruises need more time to heal completely; the body is not recovering as swiftly as it did years ago.
It follows, then, that if you do injure yourself, whether the injury is related to the activity you love to do or something else, you must let the body heal before you resume your activity. We are often so tempted to work through the pain, but this is never truly successful—especially not once we’ve reached the magic age of forty. A sprain or muscle strain must heal before you work out again, otherwise the likelihood is that you will reinjure yourself or, worse, produce muscular compensations that will, either immediately or over time, produce physical dysfunction.
So take care of injuries immediately, should they occur. The notion that “it will go away” is generally a hope rather than a reality, particularly in the mature, active years.
If you do become injured, apply RICE—rest, ice, compression, and elevation—within the first twenty-four to forty-eight hours, and with a joint-related injury. Anti-inflammatories to reduce swelling are useful if needed but should not be taken for more than a few days without medical supervision. If you have any doubt as to the severity of an injury, seek medical evaluation.
If you do develop an injury, give yourself ample time to heal before resuming physical activities that stress that muscle group.
The application of moist heat, through the use of a wet heating pad or soaking in a tub of warm water, is very useful in the treatment of sore, restricted musculature.
I’ll repeat the truth that we like to hear least of all: taking time off to heal is sometimes necessary. It ultimately allows you to practice your sport with greater frequency over time. Taking time off is difficult to do, but it is the rational thing to do.
Don’t use painkillers to mask pain.
We live in an “aspirin society.” So many of us want to take a pill and make our physical problems go away. A pill is fast and it’s easy. Unfortunately it’s also harmful in the long run. One of the purposes of pain is to alert you to a problem in a given area of the body. Pain hampers your ability to use that part of your body. Pain prevents continuous action. When pain is masked the dysfunctional body part is used freely—increased injury often results from the overuse.
Learn to use pain to your advantage. When a part of the body hurts, it requires attention. That attention might be as little as rest or as much as a visit to a health care practitioner. Whatever your body may need, don’t mask the pain; don’t pretend it isn’t there. Take care of the problem instead. Your body will benefit in the long run.
Respect your limitations.
Natural athletes are few and far between, and most of the time they are the ones who have become professionals. Physical shape and form, inherent abilities, and age all affect our ability to perform. Understand what your capabilities and limitations are: develop your capabilities and respect your limitations. When you can recognize what your limitations are you can accept them and accept what you can and cannot do in your sport. Sometimes, particularly for the serious amateur athlete, we lose sight of the fact that we are engaging in our sport for fun and good health and we end up pushing our bodies beyond their limits. Worse still, we become upset, disappointed, or frustrated because we find that our bodies will not and cannot perform as well as we’d like. It’s so important to remember that we aren’t practicing for auditions for a professional league or corps de ballet. We really are doing our sport or our art because it brings us joy: we love the movement, we love the way it feels in our bodies, and we love the camaraderie. Remember who you are and why you are engaging in your sport. By doing so you’ll find emotional peace as well as physical pleasure.
Work regularly with a health care practitioner
who understands the musculature.
Any athlete will tell you that your muscles will work better if they are worked on. This is important regardless of age, but it is especially important as we move through our mature years. Muscles should be supple and elastic. Daily life, age, stresses, activities all contribute to the physical tension that we experience as our muscles get tighter. Often our emotional tension is both reflected in and is a reflection of our physical tension.
One of the best ways to deal with this inevitable physical tension is to work with someone who is knowledgeable about the muscular system and to work with that practitioner long enough that he or she becomes knowledgeable about your muscular system. There are many health care practitioners who are capable of doing trigger point therapy: massage therapists, acupuncturists, physical therapists, osteopaths, and chiropractors to name a few. By having our muscles cared for on a regular basis, be it once a week or once a month or even several times a year, injuries can be prevented because the muscles will be kneaded and released before they become problematic.
Utilizing these guidelines may seem a bit daunting, but most of these suggestions will incorporate themselves into your life if you think about them and recognize their value within the context of your life. The smallest changes often bring the greatest results: a small dietary change can lead to a lifetime of greater health; taking a moment to remember to relax and breathe can change your day by defusing the fight that’s about to happen; stretching and using your muscles throughout the day will help to prevent Monday’s back pain after a weekend of activity; drinking a bit more purified water can lead to far better functioning of your organs, your systems, and your muscles.
If you don’t believe that you can do all of these things, try one and see how you feel. Your body will tell you how you are doing and what it needs. It just might tell you that it would like more of that good stuff.
Good luck. Be well.