The Two Main Reasons Why You Get Injured

Today we will see why you get injured with your training, practice or sport.

Lets assume you play a specific sport. Maybe you play tennis or you play soccer. What do you usually do? You probably see an athlete that you like and you want to look like them. You probably admire their skills or physique and you want to be like them. Logically the next thought that follows is “What do they do? what kind of weight training they do? What kind of skills training they do?”. So you try and do the same thing they do, hoping to get the same results as they have, but somewhere down the road you most likely injure yourself. Maybe you are injured right now as you are reading this lines.

Why is this happening?

Here is the 2 main reasons why this is happening to you.

The First Reason this happens:

That person you admire, the basketball player, the tennis player, the MMA athlete does not do only weights or practice only their skill of their sport. Their training has a variety of elements. What you see is only a fraction of what and how they train. All high level athletes, or athletes that take what they do seriously (even in a amateur level), do just train their sport. Even as an MMA athlete you will train in endurance, strength, technique, tactic, reaction time, distances (how close or far you are from your opponent). You will have such a variety in training. Maybe you will even train in gymnastics or swimming. As an athlete you never do “just weights” or “just your sport”.

That is a misconception or lack of information that many of us in the “general public” don’t have, or the gym trainers neglect to mention.

Imagine I am a trainer and you come to my gym and tell me you want to have the body of Brad Pitt from “Fight Club” or Cristiano Ronaldo. If I have never been an athlete before, I will search around men’s health or different articles about how they train, and think “Ok I got it”.However that is rarely the case. Even Brad Pitt trained in boxing, with weights, jump ropes, running etc. You come to me twice, maybe best case scenario three times/week, you have at tops 2 hours at your disposal and you want these results. If I have been an athlete, I know I don’t have the time luxury to train you as you should be trained and you probably have a life outside the gym. So, I will train you only in weights to get the results that you want. You may get the results you want to see, but they will likely come with a cost. That cost maybe in your general health, gut health, joints health, muscle health, chronic pains, fatigue or something.

It all boils down to this:

If you ONLY train ONE thing, you will get inured. People that train only (in) one thing whether that be basketball, tennis, weights, martial arts, yoga or even golf they get injured. The reason is that the whole nervous system gets tired of having the same stimuli, and several imbalances are being created, like muscular imbalance if you only use your body in a certain way. All the high level and serious athletes I mentioned before, rarely get injured while training. They may get injured while they compete, which is more common, but rarely on their training. Training in/with variety reduces the risk of overusing your body in a very specific way, and no matter how (w)holistic your training/sport/practice may be, it still overuses certain aspects of your body or nervous system.

The Second Reason this happens:

When you go training, do you give your 100%? Of course you do, or at least you try. You have to sweat every time right? “No Pain, No Gain” right? That is the train mentality that, for some unknown reason, has been engrained in almost every training culture.

Do you think Rafael Nadal, when he trains 2-3 hours per session, having maybe 2-3 sessions/day that he trains in high intensity all the time? Doing your best and doing high intensity, like there is no tomorrow, is not the same thing. Intensity NEEDS to vary. Unfortunately though, if you go 1-4 times/week for your favourite training session, you want to get the best out of it. So your intensity is, usually, always close to maximum. However that is not sustainable. You need to vary your intensity from session to session. Even yoga, that by default is a “softer” practice, needs to have varying levels of intensity throughout the week.

So next time ask yourself this:

Do I have enough/some variety in my training?

Do I vary the intensity within a week?

If the answer is “NO” to both, I suggest you better do something about it, or you are setting up yourself for injury!