To avoid breaking it helps to stay aware of broken practices.
In our culture, athletic energy is often channeled into avenues that break our bodies, and very few people lead long vibrant athletic lives. If we blindly follow typical athletic and fitness training paths, we can expect similar results. However, we can substantially escape this trap with more informed and thoughtful activity.
The human body is an amazingly versatile athletic platform that can be adapted for a wide diversity of activities and challenges. Depending on how we focus our efforts, we can achieve remarkable muscle strength, endurance, agility, precision, and an almost limitless array of strengths and skills. However, this versatility, adaptability, and potential for highly specialized performance come paired with certain downsides and substantial vulnerabilities. The athletic choices we make are important. Certain paths can break us and certain paths may require many years to prepare for in healthy and sustainable ways.
I recently devoted some time to studying athletic injuries and it was sobering to examine the incidence of injuries in the main sports in our culture. Virtually all of our major team sports are knee- and ankle-breakers and they tend to be short chapters in our athletic lives. High speed changes of direction and pivots, kicks, tackles, jumps, and sprints are all power moves, and repeatedly performing these as our bodies become fatigued over the course of a game is unnatural. It’s a recipe for injury. The human body can certainly be trained and developed to become more robust and durable to deal with such demands but we can never truly escape from the reality that performing in these ways was not quite what the human body evolved to do. Hence, even our best trained professional athletes will often injure themselves and sometimes experience career-ending injuries despite the teams of trainers, doctors, and massage therapists to support them and despite the fact that they have enough time and motivation to do the stretching, strength and mobility work that will keep them limber and durable.
For outdoor athletes there are plenty of injury risks but they are often quite different. Many outdoor sports involve low intensity adventuring outside which appears in many ways healthier for the body and more closely matched to who we are as a species. However, especially if we start venturing into the backcountry, nature poses its own risks (avalanches, thunderstorms, exposure, wild animals, etc.) and we need to learn to manage risks and come prepared. Repetitive stress injuries continue to be a substantial risk, particularly for athletes who focus on one sport. The hard-driving attitude and competitive mentality of Americans in particular leads many people on a path to do more than their bodies are prepared to handle or can recover from. Competitive endurance athletes in particular are vulnerable to overtraining and under-recovery.
When we train thoughtfully, we devote the time to build up the fatigue resistance, flexibility and durability that will help us avoid injuries on our athletic path. We focus some attention on balancing our training to prevent repetitive stress injuries. We learn and practice proper exercise form before pushing ourselves. In this way we get to keep doing the activities we love instead of having to reminisce about them in a hospital. Here are a few tips to avoid injury in our athletic lives:
Increased specialization helps us perform and accomplish impressive things in today’s specialized world, but the more we specialize the more vulnerable we become. Studies are starting to recognize increased injury risk for kids who specialize in one sport and experts are recommending that kids participate in many sports. The same findings are equally relevant for adults. Truly healthy athletic specialization is built on top of a strong general athletic foundation. Very few people today actually have and maintain a sufficiently well developed platform to build from. If we want a long athletic life it pays to always focus attention to our foundations and to balancing our development. If we want to become strong in a specialized athletic activity and do it in a sustainable way, our time commitment will probably need to be substantially higher so that we don’t skip the general foundational work.
It’s common and easy for us to find one form of exercise that we like and to only do that. However, that is the well-traveled path to overuse injuries and imbalanced development. The more we participate in one activity, the more important it becomes to devote time to balancing our training with appropriate stretching and strengthening. For outdoor athletes, stretching and strengthening exercises and core work may be boring but it does not help to view these activities as separate from the activities we love. They are not supplemental or ancillary training but instrumental parts to being able to continue to do what we love and progress to greater challenges. As we perform the training elements that we enjoy less, it becomes essential to focus our minds on how it serves what we love or what we seek.
To avoid the path of injury it is important to be really honest with ourselves about our actual level of athletic development. People of all different levels of development generally will be training differently. If we haven’t developed and practiced good form for a particular exercise it’s not safe to do it with high intensity or heavy weights. Prescribing everyone the same intense and difficult “workout of the day” (like Crossfit) regardless of their level of development can pose injury risks. I’ll probably devote an entire future blog to Crossfit because there are so many lessons from what it does well and what it does poorly and dangerously.
We tend to be impatient as we try to do high intensity work before our bodies are actually ready. Even when our bodies are fit and ready, it’s not healthy or sustainable to go hard most of the time. It’s very tempting to always go hard in our time-starved culture and there are plenty of voices encouraging us to do it; high intensity intervals are the #3 fitness trend of 2019 according to an American College of Sports Medicine survey. However too much high intensity work appears to be ultimately counterproductive and it contributes to injury and burnout. I’ll discuss exercise intensity in more detail in a future blog about aerobic training.
Training and participating as athletes will always involve certain bodily risks but we really don’t need to break our bodies. With thoughtful action we can develop and maintain our bodies and mitigate injury risk. Unfortunately, today in this country it seems that this requires us to drown out much of the noise around us. It will require us to do some boring things which can provide us with opportunities to find new avenues of fulfillment. Fortunately, it’s a feasible path that in certain other ways is physically and mentally easier than many of the paths that would break us.
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