6 Tips To Never Get Injured Again
You can get selected with poor sleep, diet, and suboptimal training. But, if you show up to selection with stress fractures or nagging injuries on day one, you are starting with one foot in the grave.
1. Stop looking for injuries
I have seen so many athletes paralyze their progress by constantly searching for injury symptoms, unnecessarily dialing back intensity, and nitpicking perfect form.
This mindset leads to a cycle of anxiety and hypersensitivity to normal training stress and soreness, which ironically could increase your risk of real injury due to altered mechanics and reduced confidence.
What so many overlook is the resilience of the human body. Even if you do experience an injury, your mindset is more important than you think. Studies have shown that athletes who focus on recovery and strengthening rather than the fear of re-injury and avoiding activity tend to recover faster and more fully.
A prime example of the importance of the mind is that after a leg injury, especially in basketball players, it’s common practice to use single-leg hops not just to test the injured leg’s recovery, but also to build confidence that the leg is fully recovered and previously dangerous ranges of motion are now safe.
So, change your mindset in your training to stop looking for injuries, and think about how you can improve your performance.
2. Warm-up
Believe it or not, in most cases, you don’t need an intricate warm-up routine that hits every muscle with dynamic stretches and exercises.
Warming up is about specificity. If you’re gearing up for deadlifts, start with just the bar. Planning a run? Start with a leisurely jog.
The key here is warming up with the movement you’re about to undertake in your workout. This method allows you to tune into your body, discerning what feels right and pinpointing any areas that may feel off.
What you may find as you warm up is that a particular part of your body feels off. For instance, your lower back is tight before deadlifts.
In this case, do some targeted myofascial release of the glutes and hang from a pull bar.
If that gives you relief, you can get back into your exercise.
As you follow this warm-up approach over the course of weeks, you will build a repertoire of prehab work that will inform the exercises you do in your workouts. Subsequently, you can begin developing a personalized warm-up routine.
But is there anything wrong with the warm-up routine you found online? No, not necessarily-just recognize it’s not tailored to you and most of the exercises are probably a waste of time.
3. Train Smart and Train Hard
This might sound straightforward, but too many people focus on one and ignore the other.
Concentrating exclusively on performance can lead to injury. On the other hand, focusing solely on training “smart” for injury prevention means you’ll never progress because your body needs increasingly greater stimulus.
So, you need to strike a balance between the two.
One way you can do this is with exercise selection and intensity: training to complete failure on barbell back squats is not the best idea, whereas leg press is safe, and hamstring curls and leg extensions are even safer.
The bottom line is that training needs to be intense, but also check your ego at the door and recognize which exercises to max out and which ones to leave a rep or two in the tank.
A pro tip is to occasionally record the last set of your exercises. What I find often is that most people are not training with poor form or pushing too close to failure; they’re operating at about 70% capacity and leaving gains on the table.
So, keep that in mind as well. Train smart but also train hard. Otherwise, you won’t make any progress.
4. Myofascial Release – lower back, shoulders, knee (it band)
I scratched the surface on this while talking about tip #2-and it’s worth expanding on.
There are three common injuries I see, and here are the techniques that often provide instant relief. I share this with the athletes I coach.
1) Lower back myofascial release
First is lower back tightness. I’ve observed it’s most common in athletes with sedentary jobs which involve lots of sitting.
Using tools like a foam roller or a massage ball, most get instant relief in their lower back by rolling the Gluteus Medius which is the top of the glutes. Whatever you do though, do not roll out your lower back and avoid stretching your hamstrings, that’s only going to make it worse.
2) IT Band Syndrome
This is a tough one and can cripple you if you’re not careful. But, simply using a lacrosse ball and foam roller on the TFL-the muscle on the front of your hip that connects to the lower leg via the IT band-can often release the tension which results in lateral knee pain.
3) Shoulder impingement and pain raising the arm overhead
The first technique is taking a lacrosse bell to your pecs to open up your chest and give your humerus more space to press without grinding up against other joints.
5. Preventative exercises
I recommend you take a targeted approach here because there are dozens of exercises I could list to avoid various types of injury.
But if you did all of them, you wouldn’t have the time for your regular training.
So, instead of that, I’ll first share two principles everyone should apply. Then I’ll share some exercises you should consider based on your specific needs
The first principle is
Balancing Your Pulling and Pushing Volume: Your pushing exercises train the front of your body and your pulling exercises train the rear.
Keeping your volume in balance or at least doing more pulling than pushing will help prevent muscle imbalances that lead to a rolled forward shoulder posture and injuries. So, for every set of pressing you do, ensure there’s at least one corresponding set of a pulling exercise.
The second principle is to
Moderate Your Running Volume: Increasing it too quickly will lead to overuse injuries like shin splints or stress fractures, especially if you’re untrained. For the sake of your long-term performance, gradually increase your running to allow your body time to adapt.
Now, here are some general preventative exercises that I like to program, and these are not in any particular order.
- Hamstring Curl
- Pull Ups
- Rows
- Face Pulls
- Shoulder External Rotation
- Tib Raise
- Band Pull Apart
6. Know when to stop
This is especially important for those of you who did sports and had a coach who was at practice telling you when to start, finish, and exactly what to do.
Once you lose that structure, it can be easy to fall into the trap of thinking more is always better. For example, if you’re doing 4 runs per week and making progress, 5 is bound to lead to even faster improvement, right?
But that’s not true. At some point, your results get worse.
This is because training volume and gains follow an inverted U-curve – it’s not linear.
Look at this chart, your goal is to find the training volume that maximizes your gains, not to do as much work as possible.
7. Active Recovery (and non-impact)
This brings me to my bonus tip on how to deal with injuries and make progress with them.
The worst mistake you can make when you get injured is to stop training. I always say shin splints are an opportunity to become the best rower, cyclist, or swimmer. Choose a non-impact cardio of choice and train hard.
When it comes to endurance, your heart does not discriminate between running, rucking, or even the elliptical. If you’re moving your body and getting your heart rate up, you can track progress and push yourself. Shin splint is not an excuse.
When it comes to the weight room and muscle or joint issues, you need to be more careful. But again, with all that effort you would have put into training that body part or that movement pattern, double down on the other aspects of your training.
Conclusion
There you have it, my top 6 tips for avoiding injury for military selection. It has worked for the athletes I’ve coached, and I bet it will work for you too.
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