Why Do Injuries Happen?

Injuries are complicated.  Often, we like to blame a particular factor or movement as to why we get injured.  However, it’s rarely that simple.  In this article, I’d like to discuss some of the factors that predispose an individual to injury. Additionally, this information should help to guide your exercise and training in a way that minimizes injury risk and keeps you pushing towards your goals.

Total Training Volume

One of the most important factors leading to injury is an individual’s training volume.  Volume, in this case, is the total time that someone is training over the course of a given period. Typically, it’s easiest to think of this over the course of a week. As you can imagine, excessive volume, especially when coupled with excessive intensity, can put an athlete at risk for sustaining an injury.  For this reason, we recommend keeping your weekly volume between 5-6 days per week with at least one rest day.  If you are new to exercise or have taken some time off, you may need to start with fewer days per week (3-4 days/week) and work your way up as your body adapts to the training stimulus.   

Technique

 Exercise technique is crucial for minimizing injury risk.  Why is this?  Well, proper technique ensures that structures are loaded properly to transfer force throughout the kinetic chain and maximize efficiency.  Ideally, we want our muscles doing most of the work and our joints, ligaments, and tendons helping to stabilize and transfer the force throughout the body.  Improper technique puts undue stress on passive structures and, over time, leads to irritation.  For this reason, it’s important to dial in your technique early.  It helps to have a coach or PT help when learning a new movement to help provide feedback and real-time adjustments that you are unable to identify yourself.  It also helps to film yourself performing the movement frequently to observe and adjust accordingly.

Dramatic Spikes in Volume or Intensity

Many injuries that we see happen from simply doing too much, too soon.  It’s easy when you start a new routine or program to get excited and wanted to push hard every day.  Runners are a great example here.  Typically, someone gets into running because they want to get in shape or lose weight (not what I recommend for either case by the way) or maybe they have taken some time off and are ready to get back to it.  Often, the individual will just jump back into their previous routine or feel like they need to be running every day.  You could see why this is a problem.  Going from minimal activity to suddenly running several miles per day is a recipe for injury.  With any activity, the body requires adequate time to adapt and recover from the physical stress that occurs during exercise. Your best bet is to ease into activity with a mindset of progression over the long-term.  Exercise is something we should be trying to do for the rest of our lives, not the rest of the month.

Training Background

 If you look at the top athlete in any gym, they probably have one big thing in common: they have been training for years.  It’s easy to overlook just how important time spent training, also known as training age, is for both performance but also the ability to avoid injury.  Why is this? With repeated exposure to an activity over months, years, and decades the body adapts to the specific demands of the activity and the structures that are repeatedly loaded become stronger and more resilient.  Additionally, the individual becomes more coordinated and efficient with their movement.  A great example is an Olympic weightlifter.  It’s easy to watch someone perform a heavy clean and jerk and think, “that looks simple enough” only to attempt the same lift with a fraction of the weight and barely be able to complete the lift.

The best recommendation here is to simply be realistic with where you are at in your fitness journey.  If you have an athletic background, that provides a good foundation for progression.  However, if you are beginning a new exercise program or activity, it’s important to put in the time, be consistent, and allow your body to learn the movement properly and have time to adapt to the new demands.

Injury History

 Previous injuries can be one of the biggest factors suggesting future injury risk.  For example, a previous knee surgery, such as an ACL repair or meniscus repair, may predispose an individual to experience knee pain with training, especially with excessive volume or inadequate progression.  This can be due to structural changes within the previously injury area but is often the result of the individual not adequately rehabbing the area leading to lingering deficits in range of motion, strength, or load tolerance.  For this reason, it’s important to consider your previous injuries and assess whether they continue to limit you from certain movements.  If so, you may need to spend some dedicated time to address any lingering limitations to ensure that a previous injury does not turn into a recurring injury.  Lucky for you, we specialize in this sort of thing!

Recovery Strategies

 Recovery from exercise is nearly as important as the hard efforts that we put in during training.  Exercise stimulates changes within the body to allow us to become more stronger, faster, and generally more fit.  However, without proper recovery, tissue breakdown from exercise exceeds the rate at which our body can repair.  If this goes on for an extended period, you guessed it, injury can occur.  How do you ensure adequate recovery?  Here are a couple of factors to consider:

1.  Nutrition

Ensure that you are getting an adequate level of calories for the level of activity that you are performing. Ideally, enough to sustain energy levels but not enough to lead to excessive weight gain.  Beyond that, make sure that you are getting enough protein for muscle recovery (~0.8 grams/lb. of bodyweight) and a good mix of carbohydrates and fats.  A generally recommendation for macronutrient ratios to start with would be (40% carb/30% protein/30% fat).

2.  Sleep

If sleep could be bottled it would be the best performance enhancing drug on the market. Ok, maybe that is a bit excessive, but the list of benefits that are achieved through sleep are numerous.  For hard-charging individuals, sleep allows our bodies and mind to recover from both a physical and psychological perspective. It also helps to regulate hormones throughout our body such as growth hormone, testosterone, estrogen, and cortisol.  Proper regulation is key to help manage stress, stimulate muscle repair and growth, and regulate appetite.  I could talk all day on sleep.  To save you from more ranting, ensure that you are aiming to get at least 7 hours of sleep. 

3.  Stress

We all know that we need to manage our stress.  Easier said than done. While it might not be the easiest thing to do, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t take a concerted effort to address the areas of stress in our life.  Without getting too into the weeds, excessive stress leads to an increase in the hormone cortisol. While cortisol does have an important role in the body, excessive levels can lead to increased inflammation, tissue breakdown, anxiety, and a suppressed immune system.  All these factors impair recovery and predispose an individual to injury. 

If you are dealing with and injury and not sure where to start, let us help.  Not only do we help you recover from the injury, but we can also help you to identify why you became injured in the first place.  That way, you get past the injury and ensure that it doesn’t happen again.