TL;DR: To prevent injury in the gym make sure you stretch, work up to your weight, get your form down, use a spotter and avoid ego lifting and over training.
Intro
It’s a story nobody likes to hear, yet all too common. You’re ready for a big day at the gym. You’ve taken your pre-workout and have got yourself all amped up. You put on your headphones and start blasting your music as you load on some serious weight on the bar. You take some deep breaths and unrack the barbell, feeling the gravity of several hundred pounds bearing down on you. You’re feeling incredible as you push through your first couple reps until all of a sudden….SNAP.
It only takes a split second to realize that you’ve seriously messed up, but it’s already too late, you have just injured yourself. If you’re lucky you may just be walking funny for a couple weeks and need to take some time off from the gym. If you’re not so lucky you may be plagued with chronic pain or other health issues for the rest of your life.
This article will go over ways to prevent injury in the gym.
Prevention
The best way to deal with injury is to avoid getting injured in the first place. Below are some things to keep in mind to help you prevent getting injured. They may all seem like common sense, but walk into any commercial gym and you’ll see plenty of guys disregarding one, two or even all of these tips.
Stretch
As our muscles sit more or less dormantly throughout the day they can become stiff and inflexible. Suddenly loading a muscle in this state with weight can cause it to tear, leading to injury. Stretching can work to loosen up your muscles prior to working out, to help prevent this from happening. Stretching also helps to improve your overall flexibility, which can help prevent injury in the event that you over extend on an exercise.
In general you want to do dynamic stretching prior to your workout to get your muscles primed for the movements they will be performing during exercise. You also want to do static stretching post workout to help with recovery and improve flexibility. We won’t go into too much detail on stretching in this article as we decided to dedicate an entire article to the topic, which you can check out here (LINK COMING SOON).
Work Up to Your Weight
This plays hand in hand with stretching. If you load a muscle that hasn’t been loaded at all recently with hundreds of pounds, its likelihood to tear or snap is greatly increased. To reduce the likelihood of this occurring you should always work up to your weight in increments.
For example, if for a particular exercise you wanted to use 225 lbs you could start by doing a set with just the bar to get you warmed up, then doing a set with 135 lbs and then an additional set with 185 lbs before finally progressing to your target of 225. This also gives you a good chance to make sure your form is correct with safer lower weights, before moving on to your heavier working weight where lifting with incorrect form is much more dangerous.
Get Your Form Down Pat and Monitor it Religiously
This is arguably the most important tip of all. You may be able to get by just fine with sketchy form for months, or even years, but eventually you will get injured at some point. By allowing yourself to create bad form habits you are essentially creating a ticking time bomb for yourself. As you get stronger and begin to lift heavier and heavier weights, the likelihood of your bad form blowing up in your face and injuring you will increase exponentially.
Before you put ANY amount of weight on the barbell you should make certain that your form is correct. Sure, it may feel silly doing workouts with a measly 45 pounds as you get your form figured out, but in the long run it is extremely worth it.
Read up online for what the correct form is for any and every exercise you want to do in the gym. (If you’re new to weightlifting www.stronglifts.com has some great information on proper form for all of the primary lifts, as well as a highly effective workout program to get you strong fast). Try to watch yourself in the mirror as you do the lift with lower weights and look for and correct any errors. Get a friend to film you performing the exercise so you can review it later and compare it to a video of correct form. Have an experienced gym-goer watch you perform the exercise and provide you with pointers. Practice, practice, practice until doing the movement with correct form becomes second nature.
Even if you’re a more experienced gym goer, it’s still important to check in on your form every once in a while. It’s easy to slip into bad habits if you’re not paying attention. If you can’t remember the last time you thought about your form, you should spend a few minutes before your next workout making sure everything still looks good with it.
For some instructions on how to do some common lifts with good form, take a look at our Muscle Building article here (LINK) (COMING SOON)
Use a Spotter
A good night’s sleep can be the difference between making your lift and failing it. Just because you lifted a certain weight at your last workout does not necessarily mean you will be able to lift it again this time. It is recommended to always use a spotter when lifting free weights, but more realistically you should get someone to spot for you when you’re lifting above 80% of your one rep max.
Not having a gym buddy is no excuse to not use a spotter. All you have to do is ask around and you’re pretty much guaranteed to find a kind stranger willing to spot you for a couple reps. Trust me, asking someone to spot for you is a whole lot less embarrassing than having them have to run over and rescue you when you fail a lift.
Also, a quick note for when you’re spotting other people: make sure you are paying attention! It only takes a second for a lift to start going south and if you’re too busy scoping out yoga pants from across the gym you could miss it and someone could get seriously injured because of you. Position yourself in a way where you are ready to jump in and help out at a moment’s notice, and also in a way where you won’t get injured yourself by spotting. Good form is still needed, even when you’re not the one who is doing the exercise.
Avoid Ego Lifting
We’ve all been there before. You’re feeling particularly strong this workout and want to try to push how much you can lift well beyond what you’ve ever lifted before. Your current one rep max on the bench may be 195 lbs but you may feel that today is the day you push it to the holy-grail milestone of 225.
This is stupid, to put it bluntly, and is probably how most guys end up getting injured. It’s not lifting in a rational way, but rather lifting with your ego. Strength training is a marathon, not a sprint. You get stronger by continually making small increments, rather than massive jumps.
Before attempting any heavy lift you should always ask yourself is this really a reasonable and sensible amount of weight for me to be attempting, or is it actually my ego driving me to do something unsafe. If it’s the latter, you should just walk away. Remind yourself that you will get to that weight eventually, and that you will get there a lot faster if you keep yourself from getting injured.
It’s really easy to fall into the trap of ego lifting when going to the gym with your friends, as naturally you will want to be able to keep up with them and not appear to be weaker. In these times remind yourself that strength training is your own personal journey. Your primary goal should be to become stronger than you were last year, not to be able to lift more than your friends can today. There is no shame in reducing the weight when working out with someone stronger than you.
If you have to compromise your form in ANY way to complete a lift you are ego lifting.
Don’t Overtrain
Spending time outside of the gym is just as important as spending time in the gym. You need to give your body adequate time to recover and rebuild after working out. Not only does overtraining lead to higher rates of injury, but it has actually been shown to lead to a decline in performance [1]. That’s right, by going to the gym too frequently you can actually end up weaker than if you took a bit more time off.
You should make sure you’re taking at least one day fully off from the gym per week, if not more. It may also be useful to have some regular deload days where you exercise with significantly less weight than you usually do. If you’re constantly feeling exhausted and are having trouble performing well outside of the gym it is a pretty surefire sign that you are overtraining and that you should reduce your workouts until you start feeling human again in your day to day life.
Conclusion
There’s no other way to put it, getting injured sucks. It especially sucks if it could have been avoided by simply taking precautionary measures or by not doing something stupid. Follow the advice in this article by stretching before your workout, working up to your weight, getting your form down and monitoring it religiously, using a spotter, avoiding ego lifting and giving yourself proper time to recover to keep yourself from getting injured while in the gym. It’s worth it! One bad injury can reverse months of progress or even set you up with lifelong health issues.
References
