Episode 273 – The Tradeoff Between Performance and Injury Prevention
Posted on June 5, 2017Welcome and thanks for stopping by, we appreciate that you’ve taken time out of your busy day to listen and hope that in return you get some valuable information or insight that you can apply into your everyday life to be the healthiest and most active version of yourself.
In my last year of University I separated my shoulder in a snowboarding accident, I was hurt bad enough that I was unable to lift weights for several months, but after about 1 month I was able to run again, so I dedicated myself to that and started running 5 days a week. It’s probably the only point in my life where I considered myself a legitimate runner and by my standards I was getting very fast running between 5 and 8km, until I started getting pain in the arch of my foot. At the time I wasn’t sure how to deal with it, but by happenstance I read an article in Men’s Health where they were interviewing Ray Zahab for running tips, for those of you that don’t know Ray is an ultra marathoner that at the time was running 6000 miles across the Sahara desert. In this article he said the best way to run injury free was to keep your pelvis inline to in front of your chest, so I started doing that and interestingly enough the pain in the arch of my foot subsided immediately and I was able to continue running, but initially I slowed down until I got used to this new running stride and adapted for it.
Since you’re listening to this show, I’m going to assume that you have somewhat of an interest in exercise and you’ve probably heard these contradicting messages, stretching isn’t good, it doesn’t do anything, it may in fact increase your chance of becoming injured and will decrease your ability to perform, don’t waste your time doing it compared to this message, stretching is really good it decreases your chance of becoming injured, you should spend more time doing it.
What should the average person who’s trying to make sense of this do?
I know I’ve read both viewpoints in the same copy of a Men’s Health magazine, which interestingly enough is also the day I stopped reading Men’s Health magazine.
Which brings me to the point, often when you change something to decrease your chance of becoming injured you will likely have a slight decrease in performance that goes along with it.
The reason this happens is because your body’s not used to performing in this new way and has adapted to your old way of doing things, so there’s a transition period you need to go through to get better and readapt, but this requires you to be patient and accept that sometimes you have to take a step backwards in performance, to let your body readapt to your new way of doing things.
There’s a reason you’ll read all this contradicting information about stretching and that’s because both sides are right, when you stretch a muscle on a given day before you do an exercise, especially if it’s a strength exercise you lengthen that muscle, pulling all the muscle fibres apart, which makes the muscle longer, and relatively speaking, a longer muscle is a weaker muscle and it’s why we often see a decrease in performance when we stretch before.
If we look at the camp that says stretching is good, what those studies look at is stretching over a period of time and then injury rates or recovery rates associated with that and broadly speaking they say stretching can decrease your chance of injury and help you feel better.
Which I know leaves you asking yourself, ‘Well what does that mean for me?’
I’m going to make my grade 6 teacher, Mrs. Goodfellow cringe by answering your question with another question, ‘What to do you want?’ Do you want to consistently exercise relatively comfortably and pain free or do you want to go full out and have the ultimate performance? Understanding that if you do push yourself through the pain, there‘s a good chance it’s going to take you longer to recover.
I know for me personally when I’m exercising and training I almost always pick comfortable and pain free, because that’s what’s going to allow me to continue training consistently and not have any injury days, but every once in awhile when I have to beat my friend Monu at squash or I have a running race where I’m really trying to set a PB I throw caution into the wind and go solely for performance.
As you’re doing your exercise programs and your training you’ll have to run these scenarios through your mind, is working through this injury, discomfort or pain going to hinder your longterm goals or is it something you have to push through on that day? If you do push through it what is the ultimate cost that you’re going to have to pay and is it really worth it or is it better to take a few steps back with respect to performance to better hone your skills, understand your movements and ultimately exercise and perform pain free.
Only you can answer these questions, but if you would like a little help or a little guidance send us an email to info@fitnessforfreedom.com and we can talk about it during one of our Q & A Wednesday’s.
