When I was young, I was an athletic enthusiast. The good news is that I was healthy, lean and loved to exercise. The bad news is that I overdo it.
One way you can overdo it is to continue even if you are injured. For example, if you strain your shoulders with a heavy bench press, swallow a bunch of ibuprofen to cover up your pain so you don’t miss your next workout. Now I know how stupid it was and that my injury needs to be completely healed before I can challenge my shoulder again. Instead, I combine the original injury with more trauma, opening the door to osteoarthritis (bone rubbing bones), and eventually to major shoulder repair surgery later in life. I opened the door.
Pushing away injuries is a common fallacy in our society, probably due to the philosophy of most coaches. Sprain your ankle. It’s not a big deal. Do that or re-tape and go back to the game. Doing this will exacerbate the original injury.
In class, I would like to ask the students at Hanover University if they can remember the incident that they continued to injure. Everyone who is an athlete can count at least one, and most can count many. Then ask if they think it worked and if it was the right thing to do. Most people answer “yes” and “yes”. In response, please contact us in 20 or 30 years. This is because the body keeps such violations in the diary carefully, and when the damage progresses sufficiently, it begins to feel stiff and painful enough to wonder where it came from.
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And that’s just the starting point. It gets worse year by year as the bones rub against the bones and spoil the appearance of the bones. If it gets too bad, joint replacement will be needed. So here’s how to get around this:
What is overtraining? And how does it affect my body?
Another common mistake is overtraining caused by not understanding the relationship between exercise intensity and amount. In general, this is the opposite. If you are exercising at high intensity, you need to turn down the volume. Similarly, if you have low exercise intensity, you can increase the volume. Checking this relationship is especially important for weightlifting, also known as resistance training.
Beginner weight lifters often overtrain and guilty of overtraining. wrong. Weightlifting puts strain on muscles and often causes minor damage to muscle cells that need repair. During the repair process, the body tries to do more than repair the damage to its previous level. It overcompensates and adds more contractile protein to muscle cells. This is done to strengthen and assist the muscles in more easily addressing the challenges they will encounter in future training. However, repairs, especially overcompensation, take time and resources to achieve. If you overdo it (high strength and too much volume), you destroy muscles excessively. This requires more rehab time, but if you don’t provide it, your next workout will attack your muscles before they fully recover.
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What is the value of an exercise rest day?
Perhaps the most important finding in strength training over the last 75 years is the value of rest. This lesson was too late for the American Olympic weightlifting team in the 1960s. Until then, Americans were the best weightlifters in the Olympics, winning gold medals in almost every weight class. Then something happened.
Yes, anabolic steroid hormones have appeared in the field, but all countries have used them, and they were not yet illegal. An important development was the application of science to training, just as Russia and Bulgaria did. In the process, they overtook the Americans and left us to the point of being lucky enough to win a bronze medal in any weight class. ..
Two important scientific discoveries have made Russians and Bulgarians move forward at the Olympic Games. The first was to increase the intensity of the training and increase the intensity by reducing the amount of training. The second was to take breaks between training sessions for full recovery.
Ironically, at the time, the performance of the Olympics declined, and Americans went in the opposite direction. To catch up, American weightlifters have increased the intensity and amount of training. Part of this was caused by false information from Bulgarian people who intentionally had a “cheek tongue”. They mistakenly told Americans that they were not as hard trained as Bulgarian. As a result, they are increasingly lagging behind. The opposite was true, but I wasn’t sure.
Only when the Iron Curtain came down and communication improved, did the truth come to light that the Bulgarians laughed at our stupidity and the American team was badly overtrained.
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How do I balance exercise, diet and sleep?
This brings another important aspect of training. When training, think of the overall approach as a three-legged stool. One leg is exercise. It is important not only to exercise in the correct way as described above, but also to pay attention to the other two legs.
The second leg is proper nutrition and protein is a major factor. The average person needs about 0.36 grams of protein per pound of body weight. This can increase to 0.55 grams for runners and other endurance athletes. However, for weight lifters, the protein requirement is at least 0.72 grams, and for those who train very hard with very high intensity, it can be as high as 1.0 grams per pound of body weight.
The third leg is sleep. Working hard is just a preparation for progress. Actual progress occurs during sleep, as this is when reconstruction and protein synthesis are maximized. In other words, if you don’t get enough sleep, no matter how much you focus on training and nutrition, you’re short-changing yourself. The average person needs 7-9 hours of sleep each night, and those who engage in intense training need at least that amount of quality sleep.
The bottom line is that strenuous exercise is great for your body, but you have to be smart about it and not overdo it.
Contact Brian Stanford (stamford@hanover.edu), a professor of kinematics and integrated physiology at Hanover University.
