3 Common joint injuries during home work-out (prevention and tips)

I’m Shravya, a certified yoga instructor and a personal trainer.

Here are 3 most common joint injuries that occur during a home workout and the ways to prevent it.
So that you can reap the benefits of your workouts without having to worry about injuries.

Let’s get started

1. Knee injuries

While performing lower body exercises like squats, lunges or numerous variations of these, you should feel the burn in your hamstrings, quads, and glutes.

But if your form is compromised or if you are not activating the relevant muscles, you might feel it in your knees resulting in pain, swelling and even sprains.

Some of you might think that knee pain is common while performing lower body exercises but it cannot be farther from the truth

Now we’ll talk about the ways to prevent these knee injuries

A. Proper knee position

If you take a lunge for example. The leading leg should always have its knee in line with the ankle and perpendicular to the floor.

However, if it’s hard for you to hold it this way, you can slightly move your knee towards you, but never past the ankle.

B. Activating the appropriate muscles
 Take this squat for example…

You can see that I’m actively pushing my hips and glutes back, engaging them otherwise the knees would automatically bend forward increasing the load on the knee joint.

Think of it as sitting back on a chair in a controlled descent WITH your back flat.

C. Proper positioning of the feet

While performing any lower body exercises, make sure your feet are firmly anchored to the ground and pointed slightly outward, if your feet are lifted or pointed inward again, that puts excess pressure on the knee joints which would lead to damage.

2. Wrist joint injuries

This is one of the most commonly overlooked joint in my experience. Unless you are into bodyweight exercises like planks, push-ups or weightlifting you wouldn’t know how heavily these exercises rely on the wrists.

If you observe your wrists getting tender, sore or losing grip after this kind of workouts here are few ways to prevent it.

A. Wrist stability

Keeping your wrists firm and stable is the most important thing.

While lifting weights make sure your wrists are not dropped down or pulled up in an exaggerated manner.

During a plank or a push up make sure you’re wrists are not wobbling around.

If you are unable to attain this stability, it’s time for you to try less advanced variations. Which brings me to my next point.

B. Modifying the exercises

If you are just starting out with this kind of exercises or have some pre-existing wrist problems.Then it’s wise not to go on full swing just yet.

• Instead of lifting weights go for water bottles

• Instead of a high planks, you can go with an elbow plank

• Instead of a full push-up do it on your knees.

There is always a workaround guys, but overworking yourself to the point of injury is never an option.

C. Do not lock your elbows

While performing exercises which require full arm extensions make sure you r not overextending it, which puts your joints at the risk of injury.

If you are a beginner or you lift heavy weights make sure you have a slight bend in the elbows to reduce pressure on your wrist joint and even the elbow.

3. Ankle joint injuries

While performing cardio and high-intensity exercises, our ankles work overtime.

If you constantly feel sore, strained, painful and stiff in your ankle and want help re-evaluating your workout methods you’ve come to the right place.

A. Strengthen your core and glutes

You have to strengthen other important muscles such as your glutes and core for an Injury free high intensity work-out.

Take jumping jacks for example

The constant notion of jumping up and down needs a lot of strength and stability. If you don’t possess it you might twist your ankle or sprain it in process.

A strong core and glutes not only help you have strength and stability but also high endurance.

Thereby preventing injuries in your ankle while performing high-intensity cardio exercises.

B. Warming up

While performing HIIT workouts. We all know how important it is to stretch beforehand to get the blood circulating to your whole body. But at the same time you have to focus more on stretching the ankles, quads, glutes and your lower back muscles.

Which would loosen them up and improve your flexibility thereby reducing the risk of injury.

C. Do not Overuse the joint

I’ve worked clients who get driven solely by losing weight as soon as possible wanting to perform intense cardio and HIIT exercises every day. While I’m impressed by the drive. I always advise them against it.

Coz guys, you need to understand that reaching your goal fast isn’t as important as reaching it safely.

So make sure you take the time to rest and recover otherwise you’d be overusing the ankle from constant high intensity workouts causing repititive micro trauma on it which could lead to cellular and extra cellular degeneration.

That’s how youy train effectively to stay fit, healthy and perform an injury free workout, without having to worry about injuries.

Refer to my YouTube video explaining all the above in detail on my channel ‘Fitness with Shravya’.

Here’s the link
https://youtu.be/YdDtH-mf-7I