This article talks about several factors that can help you in preventing sports injuries:
• Warm-up: It helps to prepare your body for exercise by loosening up your joints and muscles while increasing your heart rate. Example: Riding a bike, jumping rope, a light jog for 10 minutes. A cool-down post in your training session is also important to bring your heart rate back to normal.
• Stretching: Stretch your muscles to prevent injury and improve flexibility. Stretch before your warm-up and after cool down.
• Move at your comfort level: Gradual increase of duration, frequency and intensity is the key to prevent injuries. Don’t push yourself too hard because as you increase your fitness abilities your ability to challenge yourself also increases.
• Try different workouts: Don’t overuse one set of muscles as frequent use of the same set of muscles can lead to injuries like tendonitis or shin splints.
• Wear protective equipment: Invest in good protective equipment as it helps to prevent injuries.
• Fuel your body: Proper nutrition and hydration is the key to a great training session. Focus on water, fruits, sports drinks, etc for sustainable energy throughout your training session.
• Focus on recovery: Rest properly as it helps you to get the most out of your training and prevents injury. Incomplete recovery leads to lethargy, tiredness that impacts your overall performance. Insufficient recovery can lead to muscle tiredness, poor appetite, an increase in resting heart rate, inability to sleep, etc. If you feel too tired, it means that you need to reduce your training load and focus on resting and recovering to reach your optimum levels.
• Always remember to listen to your body and don’t focus too much on the phrase “no pain no gain.” If you push yourself too much to a point of pain then your training might have some damaging effects and lead to severe injuries.
