3 Principles to Get Strong Without Getting Hurt

3 Principles to Get Strong Without Getting Hurt

Are you afraid you’re going to get injured lifting weights?

Do you think it’s impossible to get strong lifting heavy weights while staying injury-free?

For a while, I thought the same thing.

Every time I pushed harder on deadlifts, my back would hurt.

Every time I pushed harder on the bench press, my shoulder would hurt.

Then, I discovered several key principles to getting strong while staying pain-free.

Do you have a long-term strategy with your training, or do you hop from program to program?

If you’re a program hopper, don’t worry – I was there for many years.

If you’re walking into the gym without a concrete, long-term plan, you’re setting yourself up for failure – and possibly injury.

Because you’re not routinely tracking your overall volume and progress, you’re going to have a difficult time knowing whether you’re lifting the right amount of weight and doing the correct number of sets and reps.

When determining a long-term plan for your training, you need to ask yourself several questions:

1. What’s my No. 1 fitness goal right now?

2. What’s my current training and health status?

3. Based on my current training and health status, what’s the appropriate exercise selection and volume for my goal?

First, you need to establish a specific training goal. Don’t just say you want to get more toned. What does that even mean?

And don’t set multiple goals. Training to lose weight and build muscle mass are two completely different goals. Unless you’re a beginner and are in the phase of making “newbie” gains, you’re not going to achieve both at once.

Specific goals get specific results. Unspecific goals get unspecific results.

Let’s say your goal is to lose 10 pounds.

Now, you need to consider your current training status. Have you been working out? How many days per week have you been working out? How many sets and reps have you been using? Do you have any specific injuries?

Then, make small changes to your training. Don’t give your body more than it can handle. That’s when injuries happen.

If you don’t trust yourself to make these changes, you can get a mentor or hire a coach.

Injuries occur when we give our bodies a stress it can’t handle. Many times, they occur because we increase the weight and volume too fast.

We go right to our max weight on a particular exercise the first or second workout. Then, we don’t ever get a chance to work on proper form with a lighter weight.

Since we never had a chance to work on proper form before pushing the weight, we’re going to compensate with our movement and wind up using the wrong muscles to lift the weight.

For example, even if you think you can bench press 120 pounds, don’t start out at 120 pounds on day one. Instead, start off at 60 pounds. It will feel really easy, but who cares? Then, go to 65 pounds the next time. Then, go to 70 pounds the next time.

By the time you get to 120 pounds, you’ll feel super confident in your form and be able to blow past that number.

Imagine if you increased an exercise five pounds even every other workout for a year. That’s a 130-pound increase in one year!

You can also progress too quickly on training volume.

For example, if you haven’t trained your triceps in a year, don’t start with four sets of 10 reps of four different exercises. In this case, you went from doing no reps of triceps to 160 reps of triceps. That’s a big jump!

Instead, if you haven’t trained your triceps in a year, do two sets of eight reps with two different exercises. In this case you went from doing no reps of triceps to 32 reps of triceps. Then after doing this set-and-rep scheme for a couple of weeks, you can add a rep or two to each set. After a few more workouts, add another set.

Give your body a stress load from which it can recover.

Stress + Rest = Growth

Stress + Inadequate Rest = Decline (Injury)

If your goal is to train for the rest of your life, why does it matter what you lift today or even in the next couple of weeks?

Don’t worry about what everyone else is doing. Go at your own pace, and you’ll wind up stronger than you ever thought possible while staying healthy!

Every time you train, you need to consider your current circumstances.

How much sleep have you been getting?

How’s your nutrition been?

How stressful have things been in your life recently?

When is the last time you trained?

When is the last time you trained this muscle group?

The list goes on.

If you want to avoid getting injured and want to make progress instead, you need to consider what’s going on in every area of your life.

If you hardly got any sleep last night, you need to back off.

If you just got off an airplane following an eight-hour flight, you may need to go easy in your workout in terms of total weight lifted. Back off at least 10 percent.

If you’re feeling sore and beat up, don’t push it.

If you haven’t trained for four weeks or haven’t trained for several months, don’t pick up right where you left off.

Sure, being mentally tough and pushing out of your comfort zone are important, but not at the expense of your physical health.

If you can’t train, you can’t make progress whether your goal is to lift as much weight as possible, look good at the beach or have energy to get through the day.

So next time you’re about to do a workout, think about what you’ve got going on in other areas of your life.

Then ask yourself – if I train according to my plan as written, will I get closer to my goals or farther away from my goals?

If the answer is “farther away,” you need to make modifications and either drop the weight or volume a little bit.

And if you find yourself in a place in which you’re answering “farther away” too often, you need to focus more on what you’re doing outside the gym.

What you do OUTSIDE the gym is just as important, if not more important, than what you do INSIDE the gym.