How to Protect Your Joints from High-Intensity Workouts
A regular high-intensity workout helps in losing fat and burns a lot of calories in a short time. This is very ideal for you when you want to lose weight fast or maintain pounds and figure. However, high-intensity workouts can be pretty dangerous when done wrongly and joint injury is one bad result.
To ensure protection on your joints, one way is to always perform your high-intensity workout in their proper forms. For more tips, read down below.
1. Always warm up first
Suddenly having a high-intensity exercise with cold and stiff muscles could lead to an injury. Your joints are still brittle at this moment. It is important to get your blood flowing first to increase the elasticity and length of your muscle fibers and cartilages.
2. Gradually increase intensity
As warm-ups get your blood flowing, giving your body time to adapt to high impact exercises also helps it become stronger for what’s to come. For example, walking and brisk walking first prepares the strength of your heels and knees for running.
3. Focus on proper form
Incorrect form while exercising is the easiest way to injure yourself. Don’t cheat on your workout form just to make the movement easier. Always learn the proper execution technique to make your workouts efficient and eliminate the risk of injury. A good example of this is to land on your toes lightly and not with your heels when doing jumping workouts. Also, don’t rush to finish your sets. The speed of execution breaks proper workout form.
4. Vary workout routines daily
One good way to protect your joints is to avoid overexerting their use. To do this, you have to vary your workout routines. For example, focus on leg training on Monday mornings and arm training on Monday afternoons. Then, schedule abdominal workouts on Tuesday. After your recovery from Monday’s workout on Tuesday, return to your arm and leg training on Wednesday.
5. Wear the right footwear
Most of us go to our local discount shop where we end up buying shoes that don’t meet our workout needs. The risk of injury increases this way. Specialty shoe store employees are skilled at analyzing our feet. This way, they can suggest the best athletic shoe for your workout. The prices might be shocking but it’s a good investment rather than going to a physician because of an injury
6. Cool yourself down
Gradually cooling yourself down properly prepares your body as it returns to its relaxed state. Failure to do so could lead to the pooling of blood in your extremities, hence, the feeling of dizziness, fainting, and muscle sores. To cool yourself down, stretching or remaining standing up until your heart rate is normal are good practices to do. Your muscles are warmer, elastic, and lubricated in this stage. And stretching helps in increasing and maintaining joint mobility.
7. Listen to your body, learn to stop, and get some rest
When your body is in pain, that’s the sign that you should rest. Don’t let your ego get ahead of you. Pain is gain, true, but that only applies to encourage people not to quit when they decide to ditch the fit lifestyle. Properly taking a break and sleeping at night makes the best buffer between major performance improvement and an injured joint.
8. Avoid the weekend warrior syndrome
People who only get to exercise on weekends are at the highest risk of experiencing unexpected overload injuries. If you are a part of them, then you should prepare your body for it. For example, if you plan to go on a solo-running marathon this Saturday, then an hour of daily light jogging during the weekends will help. Walking to the grocery or to work is also one good way to strengthen your lower body and improve your cardiorespiratory endurance.
Maintaining the proper form when exercising is hard and the right shoe for your workouts might be expensive. But these investments are better to have rather than spending money on recovering and being out of commission - a cost pro cheerleaders cannot afford.
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