Don’t Overdo It: Know When To Say When with Exercise

One of the best things you can do for your body is exercise. But you want to make sure you don’t overdo it and find yourself sitting on the sidelines with an injury.

Exercising does so much good for your body and mind. It helps keep your weight down, boosts your heart health, reduces your risk for many chronic diseases and improves your mood. But as with many things in life, you can have too much of this good thing.

One of the easiest ways to hurt yourself is to jump into exercise, full bore, after a long layoff. Particularly as you get older, it’s important to let your body adjust to new levels of physical activity.

But even for regular athletes, there are dangers of overuse injury. When you work out your muscles, they get bigger. But you may not understand the impact this can have on the tendons attached to those muscles. They also need to grow to handle the loads you are putting on your muscles. Unfortunately, those tendons don’t strengthen as quickly as muscles, making them more susceptible to being overworked and strained.

With that mind, let’s look at some of the more common exercise-related injuries.

Shin splints. Shin splints is an inflammation of muscles, tendons and bones around your tibia, or shin bone. It can result in dull or razor-like pain, usually along the border of the bone. There may also be mild swelling. This overuse injury is commonly seen in runners who push their bodies further than they should. It may also be related to poor form or ill-fitting shoes.

Tendonitis. This is inflammation of a tendon, the connective tissue that attaches muscle to bone. The condition is often caused by repetitive activities or overuse. It can occur in many parts of your body, with several types of tendonitis drawing their names from athletic endeavors. This includes tennis elbow, golfer’s elbow and swimmer’s shoulder.

Stress fractures. Stress fractures are tiny cracks in one or more of your bones that your body can’t heal normally. As you go about daily life, your bones are constantly breaking and healing at the microscopic level. Trouble arises if you put too much pressure on those bones, essentially damaging them faster than they can recover. These are often seen in people – runners, for example – performing the same activity over and over. They are also more common in women and in people with a Vitamin D deficiency.

Lower back strain. These injuries are more common among people who shift from a sedentary to active lifestyle. Spending too much time at a desk or sitting on the couch can leave you with a weak core – those muscles that support the central part of your body, including your lower back. When those muscles aren’t used to being active, you are at much greater risk of back strains when doing any activity or sport that requires you to bend or move your back.

Runner’s knee. Runner’s knee is one of the most common exercise-related injuries. It’s usually a dull, aching pain in the front of the knee. It may get worse while kneeling, sitting with a bent knee or walking on stairs. The condition is often found among people who play sports that involve jumping or running. It’s also frequently seen in weightlifters, as a result of poor lifting technique.

Avoiding injury. The best way to protect yourself from injury is to avoid falling into a trap where you do only one activity – weightlifting, running, biking or swimming, for example. The problem is that each of those activities has overuse injuries related to the repetitive motions required.

Cross training increases your body defenses against injury by mixing in a variety of exercises or activities that force you to use a wide range of muscles. It’s the same strategy used by professional athletes. No one is just a runner or a swimmer. They mix in other activities, including cycling, weightlifting and cardio machines.

Other strategies:

• Don’t forget the weights: Weight training, particularly as you get older, helps to maintain muscle mass, bone density and general strength.
• Use proper equipment: Poor equipment choices can increase your risk for injury. For example, if you are a runner, make sure you are wearing well-fitted shoes with high arch support. If you are weightlifter, have a different set of sneakers – with flat soles for balance.
• Add distance slowly: There’s a good rule of thumb to follow for runners. When increasing your distance, don’t add more than 10 percent to your course each week.
• Listen to your body: When you exercise, you are bound to feel some soreness. But there’s a difference between that general soreness and the sharper pains resulting from an injury. If you feel sore the day after a workout, that’s normal. But if a new pain flares up while you are exercising, that’s often a sign of injury and an indication that you should stop what you are doing.

If you are dealing with an overuse injury, understand that it isn’t going to go away until it has time to heal.