Working Out Safely

I’ve seen my fair share of exercise-related injuries. Some were relatively minor whereas others were physically devastating. If you approach strength training in a particular way, you can dramatically reduce your risk for injury. I want to share with you what I’ve done personally, and for hundreds of my clients, to keep them safe and injury-free throughout the years.

What exactly causes injuries? Is it something that you can avoid or is it something inherent in all of exercise?

The first thing that I want to address is exercise versus sports. When one exercises, they are doing so with the intention of improving some aspects of their body. For instance, if you’re bench pressing, you’re likely trying to improve the amount of weight you can lift or the amount of repetitions you can do. Likewise, you may simply be doing it just for added muscle mass or to improve a nagging injury. The purpose of exercise is to improve upon your physicality. Sport, or recreation, on the other hand is about enjoyment. You may enjoy basketball so much that you play so frequently that it may increase your aerobic endurance or get you leaner, but you’re not performing this activity for these reasons. You’re playing basketball because you like it. It’s fun to you and you get enjoyment out of it.

Sports that have the highest risk for injuries also tend to be high-impact, explosive activities. Please keep this in mind because it’s the most important principle that we can talk about here. Let’s look at an example: you are walking at a very leisurely pace, head down and looking at your phone. Suddenly, out of nowhere, you hit a light pole. While this will surely shock you, the chance of you breaking a bone or pulling a muscle is pretty minimal. Conversely, let’s say that you’re doing the same with your phone but this time you choose to run; not a sprint but a nice jogging pace. You now hit that light pole and a myriad of things can happen: concussion, broken nose, clavicle, etc. All of these potential issues are affected by speed and velocity.

A different example now: you’re at the starting line of a track and you’re racing against other competitors for the forty-yard dash. The gun goes off and you explode as quickly as possible from the starting line. Immediately, you feel your left hamstring tighten up and you wince in pain. You’re the victim of a pulled hamstring. These kind of injuries are primarily caused by the extreme explosiveness associated with standing completely and absolutely still, and then - with every bit of power in your body - exploding off of the starting line. I call that going from zero to a hundred miles instantly and it come into play very soon.

Injuries from sports are common because so many require explosiveness or violent changes in direction. Think of a running back dodging other players while running down the field; changing direction instantly and quickly. To excel at a position like that, you need those attributes.

Do you see yet, what the common denominator is? Performing things explosively and violently. Whether it’s in sports or exercise, moving suddenly with force on the body is asking for trouble.

Before you say, “Yea, but I know someone who tore their rotator cuff bench pressing,” let’s examine that and it will become even more apparent why exercising explosively is a bad idea.

Let’s look at the bench press example. It’s common to see the average gym goer perform repetitions on the bench very fast. At this point I should define what is slow and fast. Think of the flat bench press for a moment. You’re on your back with a barbell in your hands. The range-of-motion starts with your arms completely straight and moves toward the chest. Touch the barbell to your chest and push the weight back up to its starting position. Now imagine doing the lowering phase (negative) within one second and the pushing phase (concentric) within one second. A single rep will take approximately two seconds. Alternatively, imagine doing the same exercise at a different cadence; a cadence of five seconds up and five seconds down. While it may not sound like a dramatic difference, when you see this in real-life it’s quite the contrast. Performing the exercise in a fast will allow a dramatic amount of inertia and force into the equation. So much so that if you were to actually measure the force on your body (via a force plate), you would quickly see the actual weight being applied to your skeleton differ considerably. When you perform the exercise at a slower pace, you tend to eliminate inertia either entirely or to a large degree. If you measure the force on your skeleton at this slower cadence, you’re going to find that the force applied to your body is very consistent, or at the very least, differs very little from one point in the repetition to another.

This is the key. Performing exercises at a fast pace is a disaster waiting to happen. You may perform an exercise, like an explosive bench press, one hundred times before you get hurt or it may happen to you on your very first rep. As Arthur Jones, the inventor of Nautilus, said many years ago, “The next time someone suggests that you move suddenly during any form of exercise or testing, smile and walk away, because you are talking to a fool.”

Your muscles, tendons and ligaments all have a certain tensile strength that is inherent in them. Let’s say that you can bench press 225 lbs. for a single rep in a slow, controlled motion, injury-free. It would appear that your skeleton, muscles, tendons, and ligaments can all safely bear 225 lbs., right? Now ask yourself if your body can withstand 500 or 600 lbs.? Maybe or maybe not, right? If you perform something like a bench press in a fast, explosive manner, even though the physical weight on the barbell is 225 lbs., it may be much, much heavier during certain positions of the repetition and much lighter in others. If you unrack the barbell, you now have 225 lbs. in your hands. But if you quickly lower the weight you are now introducing a large amount of inertia upon the barbell. While not in a free-fall, the barbell is moving quickly towards your chest. If you could measure the force on your body when the weight is traveling down, towards your chest, you may be shocked to see that the barbell now weighs 100 lbs., or even less, based on how fast the bar is traveling. The moment it hits your chest, the force will be well over 225 lbs. It’s not ridiculous to assume the force on the body, during the transition, could be upwards of 400 lbs. Once again, ask yourself, “Can my skeleton and soft tissues handle such an enormous amount of force?” If it can’t, you’re going to have a torn muscle, tendon, ligament, or even a skeletal injury. If you perform the same exercise in a slow, controlled fashion, the amount of force on your body is roughly 225 lbs. throughout the entire range of motion.

If the above example isn’t adequate, think of this: you have a scale at home and it tells you what your body weight is. You step onto it, wait for a second, and it tells you your current body weight. While still standing on the scale, you now jump up a couple of inches up and land back down on that scale. What happens to the numbers on the scale? Initially, your body weight easily doubles and then - as you’re momentarily in the air - it goes to zero. As you land back down on the scale, your body weight can perhaps even triple. That is exactly what happens when you train explosively with weights. Don’t take that risk.

This can all be prevented or largely minimized by traveling at a slow, controlled pace when you’re strength training.

The risk factor is also dependent upon how much weight one is handling. If you’re handling a large amount of weight explosively, that is far more dangerous than less weight. Think of jumping up and down. It’s just your own bodyweight. For most people, jumping as high as possible several times will likely not give them an injury, but if someone is deconditioned, it will. Now put a barbell with some weights on that same person’s back and have them do the same thing. Naturally, you will see a higher risk for injury with the barbell but an even higher risk of injury when the barbell has more weight loaded onto it.

I’ve seen no evidence that there is a holy-grail concerning the speed at which you should be lifting weights. Some profess that ten second up and ten seconds down is superior but give no evidence of it or why exactly that’s any better than six seconds up and six seconds down (or any other slow cadence). What does appear to be useful is keeping tension on the muscle and work it through a full range-of-motion. In general, anything from a two-seconds-up to two-seconds-down all the way to a five-seconds-up, five-seconds-down is quite useful. There is no data at this time showing that something like ten-seconds-up and ten-seconds-down is any better than any of the aforementioned tempos (unless there are orthopedic considerations).

Move slow enough so that the weights are under your control, go through a full range-of-motion, and train at a high level of intensity. Remember: just as the body can move too fast to get good results, it can go too slow as well. Find a happy medium and you’ll be able to strength train for decades with the least amount of injuries possible.