11 Ways to Make Strength Training Less Dangerous for Your Joints

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Joint pain can seriously hinder your progress in strength sports. The advice of a sports doctor will help you train properly with heavy weights without pain or injury.

Heavy strength training is clearly not designed to heal the body. Sooner or later, you will feel that your shoulders, knees, elbows or hips hurt. Some just do not pay attention and continue to train until something really hurts. Most likely, this will be your first encounter with diseases such as tendonitis, bursitis, arthritis and the like.

Instead of enduring discomfort or taking pain relievers, exercise without pain. 11 tips will help you with this.

Even if you don't feel painful right now, these guidelines will help you avoid injury, treatment, and disruption in the future.

1. If it hurts, don't do it. Look for an alternative exercise

Any sports doctor will tell you that if you experience pain during exercise, you shouldn't do it. However, this does not mean that you need to stop this type of exercise altogether.

For example, people with shoulder problems often experience pain during the barbell press. In this exercise, the shoulders are in one position, so you don't have the opportunity to bench press without pain.

Bench presses can exacerbate shoulder pain, so try isolated exercises such as bow tie or crossover pinching instead. These exercises engage the pectoral muscles, but slightly alter the movement of the shoulders, which helps to avoid discomfort.

There are other options as well. “When you bench press, try using a reverse grip instead of a straight grip,” advises Guillermo Escalante, M. D., owner of the SportsPros Physical Therapy Center in Clermont. - Dumbbells are also good because they provide more freedom of movement. It is worth displacing the abductor and adductor muscles of the shoulder just a few degrees, and the pain disappears."

What's more, a new study has shown that, due to the instability of the dumbbells, exercising with them puts more strain on the muscles. Since you have to balance the dumbbells using the strength of your muscles, you will need less weight for a good load than with a barbell.

2. Perform smooth, controlled movements. Avoid jerking

Any jerky and jerky movement leads to a greater load than the same movement in the classical execution (of course, in addition to the explosive movements from weightlifting). Plus, nothing overloads a sore joint like taking a lot of weight with poor form.

If you rise sharply from the bottom during squats, push the bar with your hips, lifting the bar to the biceps, or twitch the projectile during the deadlift, joints, ligaments and tendons are under stress.

Guillermo Escalante

Guillermo Escalante recommends reducing the load and working on technique, performing movements smoothly, concentrating on them.

3. Use free weights instead of machines

The simulators have their advantages. For example, they will be useful for beginners who are not very good at keeping balance during exercise with weights.

However, simulators force you to move in a strictly defined way, do not allow joints to work freely. Try replacing machines with barbell, dumbbell, or block machine cables.

4. Warm up before exercise

Warm up before exercise sounds like a reminder to brush your teeth every day. But this is very important, especially. Warming up not only helps to lift more weight, but also relaxes muscles and connective tissues, provides flexibility and allows for more movement.

“Warming up expands the blood vessels, allowing blood to flow to the muscles that you use in your workouts,” says Escalante. - Do a 5-10 minute cardio workout to increase your heart rate, and light warm-up exercises, but do not overload the muscles. The warm-up should be dynamic. Leave static exercises for a hitch."

5. It's better to lengthen the tension time than to train to failure

If you constantly train to failure (the muscles are unable to make contractions) even with relatively light weights, you will develop joint problems. At least part of the workouts should be done not until the muscles completely fail.

Guillermo Escalante

Weight in itself is not as bad for the joints as a violation of the mechanics of movement during lifting. Unfortunately, training to failure is often accompanied by deviations from correct technique.

A recent study showed that muscle hypertrophy is more dependent on the time they spend in tension, rather than a few repetitions with the maximum possible weight.

It is better to do 12 slow reps with a lighter weight, during which the muscles are constantly tense, than 6 fast reps with the heaviest weight.

6. Alternate workouts to failure with recovery periods

“Some weightlifters like to train with heavy weights and work their muscles to failure in every workout. This is what most of the techniques for increasing intensity are designed for, says Escalante. "If you always train to the maximum, you have to sacrifice something, and your joints will be that sacrifice."

The best way to avoid this is to alternate the load. Your muscles will be stressed, but it will be combined with recovery periods - less intense workouts.

Escalante is a big fan of the undulating workout pattern. Rather than committing to heavy and light recovery training for several weeks, he prefers to alternate between these periods within the same training week.

7. Do preliminary exercises to reduce stress

Most of the time, you start your workout with a complex exercise that involves multiple joints, such as squats, bench presses, deadlifts, or overhead presses.

Try a simple exercise before a difficult one that involves only one joint. Before squats, you can straighten your legs on the simulator.

Your quads will get tired before you start squats, so you can take less weight without losing any results.

Let's say, if you start with squats, you have to lift 180 kilograms 8-12 times to ensure muscle hypertrophy.

After the preliminary leg raises, you will need to lift 140 kilograms already, staying in the 8-12 repetition range. The working weight is reduced - the load on the joints is reduced.

The preliminary exercises are performed with lighter weights than the main ones, and this gives the joints and working muscles more time to warm up. In addition, by approaching basic exercises with a feeling of slight fatigue, you will not hang too much weight on the bar. This will preserve the joints and at the same time provide all the necessary stress for muscle growth.

8. Slow down repetitions and reduce the number of sudden movements

Reducing the repetition rate is an easy way to relieve pressure from your joints.

Every time you slow down, you add stress to your muscles and save your joints from it. Controlled movement improves muscle hypertrophy, and also helps to relieve the jerky movements that often lead to injury.

Guillermo Escalante

One great technique for doing this is reverse movements. Its essence is to linger for a couple of seconds at the bottom of the exercise.

For example, let's say you're doing barbell squats. Instead of sitting down and immediately straightening, as in a normal exercise, you first fix the position at the bottom point and only then rise.

This technique increases strength in the lower part of the range of motion. Muscles need more effort to contract from a fixed position.

9. Avoid full extension of the joints

It is generally accepted that the movement must be carried through to the end. But when you fully straighten the joint, as is often done during chest, triceps, and leg exercises, the entire load is transferred to it.

“You put stress on a working joint, and the muscles are hardly working,” says Escalante. - The joint is the closest possible contact between two adjacent surfaces. This is not very good, especially if you are lifting 200-400 kilograms on a leg press. In addition, it reduces the time the muscles spend in tension, which means it slows down progress."

For example, the last 10 degrees of leg lifts on the machine provide maximum surface tension, which wears out the kneecap and leads to knee pain. The first 10 degrees can also contribute to pain. Escalante advises sticking to the middle of the range of motion.

10. Use nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and prescription medications with caution

It is not uncommon for weightlifters and powerlifters to take anti-inflammatory or analgesic medications before training to relieve dull aching joint pain.

By drowning out the pain, you only make it worse. Instead, you continue to train with high intensity and the wrong technique. In addition, regular use of pain relievers is bad for the liver.

11. Increase the intensity gradually

Most powerlifters try to build muscle with a typical 8-12 rep workout, but sometimes they try to lift the maximum weight and add an extra 20-30 pounds to the bar. This leads to a significant increase in the load on the muscles and connective tissues.

If you are making big changes in your training and expect your muscles to adapt, allow your body to adapt. If you do 12 repetitions, first reduce the number to 10 with a little more weight, then to 8 and to 6. As you adapt to such loads, you can easily alternate workouts with 4 and 10 repetitions.

Guillermo Escalante

Escalante also notes that after intense training, tendons and ligaments grow more slowly than muscles. They can become a weak link in your body, which poses a great risk of injury.

Take care of your joints, do not neglect the warm-up and do not train to failure every time, otherwise you will have to finish your path in strength sports much earlier than you planned.