IRFitness: Training injuries

To apply the quote "no pain, no gain" to your fitness life, you don't have to hurt yourself or get injured. The pain is to push yourself harder and feel the burn. The pain is to do your workout after a long working day. The pain is to sit with your friends and eat tuna salad while they are eating pizza and chocolate fudge.
That's the pain that you get used to, the other pain that you don't want to experience is the pain of injury, not only the physical pain, but the psychological pain you feel from not being able to workout for a while. If you are a fitness freak, then you know what I'm talking about, specially if you had an injury before.

The most common training pains

1- Wrist pain
Prevent excessive bending of the wrist in exercises such as push ups, chest press and shoulder press. This may cause what is known as Carpal tunnel syndrome.

2- Foot and ankle pain
This is caused by twisting the ankle in an awkward way or running in a bad shoes.

3- Knee pain
Poor harmony between your hips and your feet causes knee injury. You try to move quikly but your hips and feet do not coordinate together and the knee gets all the stress. Do lunges along with leg extensions to strengthen the knee.

4- Shoulder pain
Rotate your arms to balance your shoulders and never start working out without warming up your shoulders, whatever muscle group you are going to train. Your shoulders always get some work to do.

5- Back pain
The same to your back, always stretch and strengthen your back. Wall sits and planks help with that.

6- Neck pain
Avoid excess stress on your neck when doing overhead press. Make sure your back and neck are well supported when doing chest press. Don't lower your head when doing push ups.

Ten Most Common Causes of Training Injury

1- Incorrect Technique

It's easy to tell that a guy is going to hurt himself by watching him stressing on his neck benching or arching his back curling. Don't be that guy.

2- Too Much Weight

Extra heavy weight increases the opprtunity of getting injured. As long as you are controlling the weights and doing a good form, it's ok to increase the weights, just know when to stop.

3- Bad Spotting

Behind every strong lifter is a good spotter. The good spotter is always sensitive and alert to the possibility if failure.

4- Incorrect Use of Cheating & Forced Reps

Cheating and forced reps are advanced techniques that allow the lifter to train beyond normal. Taken past the point of failure, the muscle is literally forced to grow. When incorrectly performed, a cheating or forced rep can push or pull the lifter out of the groove. The weight collapses and a spotter must come to the rescue.

5- Training Too Often

It negatively impacts the body's overall level of strength and conditioning. Overtraining saps energy, retarding progress

6- Not Stretching

Stretch helps relax and elongate a muscle after warm up and before and after weight training

7- Inadequate Warm Up

This quick, light movement of warming up raises the temperature of the involved muscle while decreasing blood viscosity and promoting flexibility and mobility. That's what you feel, right?

8- Negative reps

The weight you can handle in negative exercises is likely to be the heaviest you'll ever lift, so you have to be very careful and relying on a very good spotter.

9- Poor Training

It's best to save the big weights, low reps, forced reps and negatives for nondiet growth periods. While dieting requires reduced poundage, this doesn't mean you can't be intense in your workout, it just means you need to use lighter weight.

10- Lack on Concentration

Getting an intense level of concentration not only get you motivated and lifting heavy but it prevents you from injury as well.