Tips On Avoiding Injury During Your Workouts
Hitting the gym can be a great way to enhance your physique and overall health. However, your workout can end up causing more harm than good if done the wrong way. Accidents resulting from excessive workouts can injure your muscles and tendons, leading to pain and reduced ability to train and maintain your fitness levels. Here are some tips that can help you avoid injury while working out at the gym.
Go easy on overhead presses
Overhead pressing movements typically provide a great workout for your shoulders, helping you gain mass in your chest and arm muscles. However, excessive overhead movements can increase the risk of injuring your rotator cuff and neck muscles. Before attempting overhead presses, be sure to first build up your shoulder blade muscles using exercises such as press ups that focus more on movements below the shoulders.
You should then ease into the overhead presses, doing a few sets in each workout while focusing more on repetitions other than lifting heavy weights. Proper technique while pressing can also help reduce the strain on your shoulder muscles and prevent injury. Keep your shoulders down and back while training and work with your gym instructor to gradually progress in weights and repetitions.
Don't neglect pull exercises
Many folks usually injure the stabilizing muscles in between their shoulder blades and on the back due to focusing more on bench presses while neglecting pull exercises. Essentially, push exercises are great at strengthening chest muscles and muscles in front of the shoulders, but they also weaken and stretch shoulder blade and back muscles.
A focus on push exercises without any pull workouts can usually round the shoulder muscles and cause injury in the long run. To be safe, make it a habit to rotate between bench pressing and pulling exercises to build up strength in your stabilizing muscles as you work your chest muscles. You should also work with a gym instructor to improve your posture during bench presses so as to avoid injuring your back or shoulder blades.
In case of an injury to your back or shoulder muscles, be sure to avoid any bench presses, as they can aggravate the muscle damage or force you to make compensation movements that could further weaken injured muscles or cause other forms of injury.
You should also work with a physio to help you modify or moderate other training routines to avoid aggravating your stabilizing muscles and advice you on how to rest and regress so as to recover from your injuries. For more information, talk to a professional like YMCA of Greater Cincinnati.