5 tips to avoid injury and burnout in your training

By Sarah Bartlett, Movement HQ Personal Trainer and Handstands, Mobility, Stretch and Strength Coach. Avoid injury and burnout with these top 5 tips.

Getting injured sucks. Not only because it hurts and derails your progress (temporarily), but it puts you at greater risk of more and worse injuries.

And if we’re being completely honest, rehab training is not the most exciting…

Similarly, if you’ve ever experienced symptoms of adrenal or chronic fatigue, you’ll know that burnout takes a long time to recover from.

Keeping it balanced

Most top-performing athletes know they stand a much better chance of reaching their ultimate potential if their training program is balanced across three key components of fitness:

• Cardiovascular fitness
• Strength
• Flexibility

The same is true for all humans!

A well balanced training program will help any human to maximally optimise their progress.

This is because a program that achieves balance across these three pillars will prevent injury, burnout and boredom.

The better balanced the athlete, the greater the ability to maximise each pillar. i.e. having greater cardiovascular fitness enables you to get more training performed in a given timeframe, which leads to greater gains in strength.

An imbalanced program will eventually lead to a breakdown, somewhere in the system.

Too much cardio, especially high intensity? This may lead to stress of the adrenals, disrupting sleep patterns, mood regulation and hormonal production, among other issues.

Too much strength? This may lead to a build up of tension in the system, may promote imbalances across joints or movements and often leads to injuries of the soft tissue (muscle, tendon, ligament, bursa, etc).

Too much flexibility? In the short term, this may increase risk of joint injury through hyperextension, dislocation, subluxation, etc.

In the longer term, too much flexibility may negatively influence your susceptibility to chronic joint and bone degenerative issues. For example, low muscle mass (which is often present in very flexible individuals) is associated with a higher risk for osteoporosis in women as they age.

To ensure you maintain a well-balanced program to not just prevent the above dangers, but to actually optimise your potential for progress in the longterm, we recommend following these 5 tips:

1. Identify your weaknesses & strengths – train to improve your weaknesses as well as optimise your strengths.

Too commonly we over-train our strengths, and ‘forget’ to prioritise our weaknesses.

People who are bendy love to stretch, and people who are tight often avoid stretching.

We tend to do more of what we enjoy and feels good. Your program should include a balance of both this, and also working on things that are less enjoyable for you, but probably necessary.

2. A solid cardiovascular system is a great foundation for any strength training program. Energy systems (cardiovascular fitness) adaptations have the least diminishing returns and are where you’ll notice improvements the fastest, session to session.

Strong cardiovascular system > better ability to recover between sets > perform more sets in workout > greater strength gains.

This is often a great starting foundation for all people looking to improve their fitness.

3. Pre-plan your training week ahead of time to ensure your program achieves balance across the three pillars. Sometimes, achieving balance is not done through a balanced program alone, if the point from which you are starting is already imbalance.

You might need to spend some time prioritising one of the pillars to achieve optimal balance.

If you start at the gym and primarily want to improve your strength and fitness, but have mobility limitations due to a lack of flexibility which puts you at greater risk of injury during strength and conditioning training, your initial program would probably include a greater focus on flexibility and cardio fitness.

This would prepare you for your strength training by reducing the risk of injury and opening up your ranges of motion, which will lead to greater muscle fibre recruitment, and therefore, gains when you do get to the strength sessions.

4. Test regularly to see where you have improved. Be mindful that whilst in the early stages of your training life, you will experience mad gains across all three pillars simultaneously for some time.

As you gain more experience as an athlete, you might find it harder to improve equally across all pillars at the same time. For this reason, the more advanced you become, you often need to spend more focused, and a greater amount of time and effort on one area, in order to see improvement.

This is because your thresholds increase overtime, meaning the amount of work that is required to stimulate adaptation must also increase overtime. Regular testing can help you to identify your key areas to focus on in future program phases.

5. Hire a coach – especially one specifically skilled in the area you are looking to improve.

If you don’t do your own taxes, service your own car, or cut your own hair, why would you leave it up to yourself to write your training program?!

“A good coach will help you achieve everything on this list, only faster. If it is not your area of expertise, but it is something that matters to you, hire a professional.”

READ MORE ABOUT SARAH HERE