Every rep, every set, and every workout produces wear and tear on your body. If you’re a hard-training athlete, you’re past the point where you need to worry about exercising for health. You need to make sure your training doesn’t interfere with your health.

If you stay in the iron game for long, you’re eventually going to get hurt. It’s unavoidable. Even if you’ve stayed healthy for years, one bad rep or even a slip or fall outside the gym can leave you with a nagging injury.

Every rep, every set, and every workout produces wear and tear on your body. If you’re a hard-training athlete, you’re past the point where you need to worry about exercising for health. You need to make sure your training doesn’t interfere with your health.

Fortunately, there are more than enough ways to ward off nagging aches and pains before they become serious injuries that keep you out of the gym. To do so, you’ll need a little know-how, a little patience, and the willingness to try some different things.

Pushing through the pain may work for a little while, but it will come back to haunt you. Try these approaches instead.

If bench presses hurt your shoulders and you aren’t a competitive lifter, why are you doing them? [Photo credit: Andrew Blight | CC BY 2.0]

Preserve Your Shoulders

The shoulder is the body’s most mobile joint, and that mobility makes it the most vulnerable.

Just like gadgets with lots of moving parts, your shoulder has all sorts of intricate muscles, ligaments, and tendons that can fall apart if they’re used incorrectly.

Unless you’re a powerlifter or strongman who has to do certain exercises for competition, the best thing you can do for your shoulder health is to avoid the movements that hurt it the most.

For some people this is the bench press, though it’s not as dangerous a move as some would have you think. For others, it’s dips, incline pressing, or overhead pressing. There are plenty of pressing movements you can use to build your chest, delts and triceps, so don’t force a painful exercise.

Aside from exercise selection, upper back placement will be a lifesaver for your shoulders. No matter what type of pressing movement you’re doing—flat, incline, whatever—you need to have your scapula retracted throughout the entire range of motion.

Doing so will keep your rotator cuff muscles safer, and your chest will be in a position to do more of the work.

Stronger Glutes to Protect the Low Back

Lower back health is worthy of an article all its own. I’m not a doctor, so I can’t recommend anything for a slipped disc, herniation, or any other serious condition.

However, I can tell you what’s saved my lower back and the backs of plenty of my clients: glute work.

Your glutes and lower back tend to fire at about the same time during squats and deadlifts, and if one is weak, the other has to compensate. If you’re rounding your back during squats and deads, take the weight down, arch your lower back, and teach yourself to fire your glutes first and foremost.

Your strength will progress much more quickly and consistently in the long run, and you won’t have to deal with a sore lower back nearly as often.

Keep the Weights Reasonable for Your Knees

Knee health is a big issue for longtime athletes and taller lifters. I’ve read all sorts of articles that claim that your knees “should” be just fine no matter how heavy or how often you squat, as long as you’re using a certain form. I call BS.

We evolved to survive, not to build comically huge legs and a massive squat. If you do the work necessary to get the numbers you want, your knees are going to be at risk.

Still, you do want those numbers! To protect your knees for the long haul, train in phases so that you’re not always squatting stupidly heavy.

Don’t bother maxing out or hitting super-heavy doubles or triples, either. Unless you’re a powerlifter in the last stages of prep for a meet, there’s simply no reason to go that heavy. Sets of about five reps are great for getting stronger, and sets of around ten reps for building size.

In fact, the quads respond better than almost any other body part to moderate weight and high reps. Of course, you have to get progressively stronger to increase that “moderate” weight.

But throughout much of the year, you can make insane progress on your legs by training with 60-70 percent of your squat max for lots of perfect, controlled sets and reps.

Experiment With Your Squats for Happy Hips

The hip joint is similar in structure to the shoulder. As with pressing movements, one of the best things you can do for hip health is to find the squat variations that cause you minimal joint discomfort.

For most lifters, this means using a moderate or close stance. If you’ve got a long torso, your lower back is more likely to be a problem area. But if you’re long-legged, squatting will put more wear and tear on your hips (and knees) due to your long range of motion.

A high bar position will also keep your joints in better shape. Though you’ll have to use less weight than if you went low-bar, the extra range of motion will provide just as great a stimulus for your quads and glutes.

Unless you’re competing in powerlifting and need the biggest squat possible, this will probably be your best bet for consistent, pain-free progress.

Don’t Overload Your Elbows

If your elbows are bothering you, first look to things other than the pressing movements as the potential cause. Are you doing super-heavy skull crushers? If so, stop.

Arm training should not be as heavy as squatting, pulling, and pressing, since your relatively small elbows have to take almost all of the load. Keep your skull crushers and other extensions light, in the 15-20 rep range, and use dips and close-grip presses for the heavy work.

Believe it or not, the way you squat could be what’s killing your elbows when you bench.

Ideally, you’ll be driving your elbows forward when you squat to promote the correct torso position. But if your hands are close together, and you’re shooting your elbows forward, all of those surrounding muscles and tendons are being stretched to the max. The solution? Widen your squat grip.

Train for the Long Term

Ultimately, any of these approaches won’t do a thing to prevent injury if you still try to power through workouts while you’re hurt. It may make sense once in a while, especially if you have a competition coming up or if you’re about to take a week or two off.

But for the most part, you need to approach each training session with a long-term mindset.

If your shoulders are killing you today, you could rest, recover and come back strong next week or you could go HAM on bench and put yourself out for the next few months. Which one sounds better to you?

Achy shoulders holding your training back? Time to go to school:

Simplifying Shoulder Health for Strength Athletes

The post Training Should Not Interfere With Your Health appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

If you’ve been training for even a couple of years, the above scenario probably sounds familiar. As much as we all love to hit the iron, not every session can be great, and there are going to be stretches of time when you’re just going through the motions. Still, there are plenty of ways you can switch things up to remove that staleness and get your gains back on track. Here are a few tips on restructuring your training when you’re bored, burnt out and need a change.

Is More Variation Always Good?

Let’s get one thing out of the way first. I’m not saying you need to “keep your body guessing” by constantly switching up your routine, or by never performing the same workout twice. The only way to reliably improve your physique is to measurably improve your performance in the gym. To do that, you have to be consistent enough with your workouts to measure a change from one week to the next.

Train “instinctively?” Do “what your body tells you to do?” If you followed those rules, you’d never do anything effective. The type of training that really changes your body is the kind that you probably don’t “feel” like doing. That said, there are definitely ways you can switch things up to make training fun, exciting, and effective once again.

If your training has gone flat, the answer isn’t to change everything, but just a few things. [Photo credit: Lance Goyke on Flickr | CC BY 2.0]

Change Your Focus

Have you been grinding away at the same goal for more than a few months? Fat loss, muscle building, strength, conditioning – any one of those goals is great to zero in on, but you’ll eventually stagnate if that’s all you ever do. Your body adapts to a certain type of training stimulus, and once it does, you’ll just start spinning your wheels.

So if you’ve been focusing on size for a while, switch gears toward building strength. If you’ve been dieting for what seems like forever, return to maintenance calories for a month or two and focus on pushing your training weights back up to where they were. And if you’re feeling a little too fat, out of breath, and not very “athletic,” it can’t hurt to focus on sprints, agility drills and even slow cardio for a few weeks while putting the heavy work on the back burner.

Change Your Movements

I don’t think beginner or intermediate athletes should be switching their exercises every week. However, if you’ve been using the same small set of movements for the last few months, it’s almost certainly time for a change.

For instance, if you’ve started every workout for the last few months with back squats, switch to front squats for a while, or make your stance wider or narrower. The variation doesn’t need to be huge, but it does need to be different enough that you have to learn a new motor pattern and work your way up in weight. Whatever variations you choose, stick with them for at least a couple of months to really reap their benefits, before you switch back to your old exercises.

Change Your Rep Ranges

Do you always lift “heavy,” in the 4-5 rep range? Or are you more of a higher-rep guy, usually sticking to 10-12 reps per set? Either way, you’ll eventually need to change things up. Higher reps are generally better for building muscle, and lower reps and heavier weights are king for building strength. If you’re going to change your focus, you’re going to need to change your rep range and weights accordingly.

When you switch from one rep range to another, remember that your body will have different metabolic demands. You won’t be able to put away as much food doing lower-rep, heavier work as you can when you’re doing higher volume workouts. Just as you can’t train for maximum size gains all year ‘round, you shouldn’t eat like you’re bulking for twelve months of the year. You’ll set yourself up for maximum long-term success by programming your training and your diet to different phases through the year.

Change Your Split or Frequency

Switching up your split offers two big benefits. First, it’s psychologically different. Keeping the same schedule every week is going to get boring. Even if the physiological processes aren’t dramatically different, just changing the order or arrangement of your weekly routine can make your whole training program seem new and exciting again.

The other big benefit of changing your split is a change in frequency. Let’s say you’re currently hitting each muscle super hard once per week. If you switch to a higher-frequency, lower-volume approach, you’re probably going to grow just from the stimulus of greater frequency. Likewise, if you currently train each muscle two or three times per week with low or moderate volume, switching to a routine where you absolutely annihilate each muscle once a week will have similar results.

Results – They’re Never Boring

Whatever changes you you make, stay focused on what really counts – results. You’re in this to build muscle, burn fat, gain strength, and improve your physique, and making progress towards those goals almost never gets old. If you aren’t making progress, change a variable or two and see if the results start rolling again. Keep your eye on the prize, and you’ll keep the passion for training alive.

If you’re stuck on a training plateau, maybe it’s time to reevaluate your program:

Programming for Snowflakes

Coaches: Are your programs written for your athletes, or yourself?

Do You Have Flexibility in Your Programming?

The post How to Train When You’re Bored appeared first on Breaking Muscle.