How to feel good and reduce your risk of injury
Who wouldn’t want to look good, feel good, and reduce their risk of injury - right? It sounds like a pretty good life to me. While there are many aspects that contribute to this, one of your main areas of focus should be getting stronger.
Whether you aren’t sure how to start or you feel like you’ve hit a plateau, I’ve got you!
You have to weight train. Body weight movements are a good place to start for beginners. But at some point, it’s gonna be necessary to add resistance bands and weights to your workouts in order to get stronger.
You have to progressively overload your training. Training has to get harder over time by performing more reps or more weight. Each week, you want to try to push a little harder than the week before. Keep in mind that you won’t be able to add 5 pounds each week forever; you’d be breaking world records if you could! At some point you’re gonna hit a wall where you can’t lift heavier or add more reps with good form. That’s normal and it’s ok. And that takes us to point #3.
Continue to consistently train hard. Intensity matters here folks. Unless you’re recovering from an injury, you want to be working at a 7/10 effort most of the time. This means that you can leave 3 reps left in the tank with good form. This tends to be the sweet spot for most people and the point where you can get the benefit of getting stronger without getting hurt. This isn’t to say that you can’t work at an 8-10/10 intensity, but you don’t want to be working here all the time.
Take deload weeks. Every time you start a new training cycle you’ll want the first week to be a deload week. Training cycles typically last 4-6 weeks. A deload week means that during this first week you’ll want to decrease the weights and focus on executing the movements with good form. Deload weeks help reduce the risk of overtraining or injury.
Hire a coach or invest in quality programming. Listen, even I have a coach and follow someone else’s programming. Even though I program strength training for client’s all day long, I need to rely on someone else to program for me. Same goes for nutrition planning. I highly recommend that you get guidance and accountability from a coach, rather than try to go it alone.
Gaining and maintaining strength is crucial to our overall health and well-being. Not only does being strong make us feel good and look good, it helps us live longer and reduces our risk of injury.
Make getting stronger a priority. And if you don’t know how to start or you feel like you’ve plateaued, I’m here to help. We can set up a consultation, go over your goals, and start formulating a plan for change.
In Health,
Dr. Kira
