Sport
Do You Want To Risk Destroying Your Body in the Gym?
Why do bad things happen when you let your emotions select the weights for you?
There are few things in the world as fulfilling as lifting a new record weight in the gym while you listen to your favorite song on full volume. Emotions are therefore undoubtedly very present and also very important when working out. After all, the best way to ensure you hit the gym regularly is to enjoy what you do there. But especially inexperienced athletes tend to get carried away by their emotions. They do too much and put too much stress on their body. This often leads to injuries or, in extreme cases, those scary gym-fail videos we all know. This is why I am writing this article. I don’t want you to hurt yourself in the gym. So better read till the end to prevent yourself from getting injured.
Disclaimer: I love working out. In my opinion, it is the one thing truly everybody should do, because it comes with so many benefits. Not only will you look better, but your overall health is also going to improve drastically. This article is by no means meant to scare you, or anyone, away from hitting the gym. Instead, learn from it and train healthy.
Training too hard is dangerous.
But how do you know that you are “training too hard”? This is a question you can only answer for yourself. That’s where the problem of training too heavy arises. Many athletes are too inexperienced to know when to stop adding weights or doing even more reps. If they, however, do, so they will at some point train too hard. This leads to two things.
1. Training with bad form
At first, they will, mostly, unconsciously start executing the reps they struggle with by doing them with bad form. This is a natural adaptation from your brain, which tries to find a way for you to still achieve your goal. By doing so, it might try to recruit more muscles to complete the movement. While this might make you at least appear stronger, it removes the focus from the muscle you initially tried to train.
Furthermore, this might not lead to instant injury, but it will damage, for example, your joints and ligaments. You might be tempted to think this isn’t a big problem because they can adapt to the new stimulus. The problem with that, however, is that ligaments and joints take a lot longer to adapt, and therefore you can almost be sure that they won’t have fully recovered from the overuse until your next training session.
One physiotherapist with whom I have talked recently even went as far as saying that he often sees people in the gym performing exercises with such a bad form that he would love to give his business card to them. According to him, that’s because he already knows they will need a physiotherapist like him in the future too.
All in all bad form can lead to long-term damage which you might only become aware of when it is too late already.
2. Injury
If they keep pushing despite having already started training with bad form, even worse things can still happen.
That’s the point where the weight just physically gets too heavy for their muscles and bones. Their body starts breaking down. Muscle fibers tear, and joints get crushed.
They get badly injured and might not be able to train ever again, or at least for a very long time.
How to not destroy your body when training
What I just described to you, however, is by no means what happens to everyone in the gym. That’s because most athletes understand when to keep pushing and when to stop. I have two tips to ensure you don’t get hurt.
1. Put more focus on form
When you exercise with a lot of weight, focus on your form more than you would otherwise. Stop the music. Take a deep breath and listen to your body while carefully performing the reps with attention to detail concerning your form.
2. Only add weights slowly
Despite focusing more on the proper form, you should also make sure to only increase weight slowly. Stop letting your decision of how much you are going to lift be influenced by what you see on the weight stack of the guy next to you. Stop letting your ego select the weights for you.
That’s it. I hope you have learned something. After all, going to the gym is awesome, but if you get injured, you might never get to go there again. So train safe and always listen to your body. Don’t let your ego select the weights for you; instead, focus on what is right for you, depending on your current level of progress.
