Injury Prevention: How to manage exercise and remain injury free (2/4)

As we discussed in the previous article, as a person aiming for a regular and active lifestyle, one must try to understand the physical limitations of their body.
How to be aware of your own physical limits?
As a general rule, every single human being maintains a few distinct features in their body. Although we may appear all the same, there are intricate small details that remain different for all individuals. This uniqueness is often mistaken – a person gaining weight easily as compared to a person who finds it impossible to gain weight cannot be judged on the same barometer. In order to find about your physical limitations, a comprehensive exercise plan is necessary

• Find a starting point: A person of your height and weight may have a totally difference endurance point. It can all be down to the breathing capability (air intake), metabolism rate, muscle strength, bone density or other factors. All the information that you read and see are general guidelines and not rules. If you have an exercise partner and that person continues to outshine you or is considerably lower in performance benchmarks than you – there is nothing to worry or celebrate. To accurately estimate your starting point, you should spend one week where you try to see how far you can go without discomfort tiredness and pain. If you have chosen walking as your desired activity, see how many steps you can do. Do this activity over a week to find your median average and threshold. Once you have obtained data over a longer span of time, you are in a better position to estimate your performance benchmarks.

• Monitor exercise gains properly: Instinct is not always the best way to judge your performance. Yes you may feel lighter and even your size has gone down a little – you still need to find accurate measures to calculate your gains. Injury prevention revolves very finely around the amount of effort that you are spending to the returns that you are obtaining. If you are able to maintain a fine balance between the two, you will be able to remain injury free. Consider an example – if you have set yourself a target of additional 400 steps every day until you reach 10,000 steps a day, you can easily calculate the amount of calories that you burnt and the physical tiredness that you felt. If at any moment you feel that you are unable to do more or you require eating more to perform the task – the incremental gain goes in the negative (you start to consume more calories to balance out the negative impact of exercise).

A comprehensive exercise plan can help you to create a plan within your physical limitations without spending extra energy.
Photo credit: Ed Yourdon via Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA