How To Stay Injury Free - My Top 5 Tips

Getting injured and having to rest is a real bugbear for anyone who enjoys being active.

There's a mental health consideration when you can't go to your regular group exercise classes and see your workout buddies for a while.. 

It's so frustrating when an injury stops you from taking part in an event, race or competition that you've spent months training for.

And for instructors not being able to teach means reduced income and sometimes losing classes if it's a long-term injury. 

I've been teaching group fitness classes since 2011 and full-time since March 2012. I'm in the minority of instructors who teach group exercise classes full-time with no additional income from other sources.

I currently teach 31 classes a week, and I often get asked how I manage this number of classes without breaking.

Here are my top 5 tips for staying injury free (in no particular order):

• Awareness 
• Boundaries
• Variety
• Recovery - Sleep and metabolic health
• The right support network

Let's dive deeper into each one.....

1) Awareness

Without doubt this is your number one tool in the fight to stay healthy and injury free.

There's different types of awareness, such as:

• Knowledge of how the body actually works to create posture and movement.

A common mistake is to think of your body like an engine, made up of single working components. When 1 part breaks down you simply visit the relevant expert to get it fixed. This is why so many people fail to recover fully from an injury and end up with a persistent pain or stiffness. 

Your body is not made up of a series of single parts that can be repaired individually. Humans have evolved to have a highly complex brain, nervous system and consciousness. This is completely integral to your physical body, and must be considered when looking at movement, pain and injury.

• Awareness of self

Spend time quietly observing how your body and mind respond to different movements without trying to over-analyse, rationalise or make sense of what you're feeling or thinking. 

The human mind constructs a story to make sense of what it's experiencing. This becomes embedded into your subconscious neural networks and begins to run your behaviour and actions without you consciously thinking about it. Bringing awareness to previously unnoticed sensations and thought patterns will help you decide if they're helpful and whether to keep them or change them.

• Voluntary control of muscle behaviour

Developing conscious awareness of the physical sensations from your body and thought patterns running through your mind will help to increase the voluntary control you have over how your muscles behave.

For example, are you aware of which muscles are tensing at any given time and can you voluntarily relax those tense muscles? This is especially useful when you have a non-specific type of pain, like a persistent back ache or stiff shoulders. 

The more awareness you cultivate the sooner you'll know that something may be amiss, the more proactive you can be in taking action, and you'll know what to do first to prevent an injury from happening or how best to help the body recover if you do get hurt.

2) Boundaries

Does this seem like an odd one to include?

Here's why boundaries makes my top 5 tips for staying injury free.

As a new instructor I was always willing to accept cover work. I needed the experience and I didn't have many regular classes in the beginning. As my class schedule became busier I still took on additional work, sometimes at very short notice.

Whilst I was always able to teach my classes I would often wake up feeling lethargic and finish the day drained physically, mentally and emotionally. My muscles ached all the time, a bit like permanent, low grade DOMS. I struggled massively with time keeping and was always rushing or running late. It was hugely stressful.

I genuinely thought this was a normal by-product of being busy and doing a lot of physical activity, but I was wrong.

When I started putting in boundaries I noticed that I had more white space in my days, I didn't need to rush around, and everything felt calmer and easier. 

Here's some of the boundaries I've put in place:

• Times of the day when I'm prepared to teach and when I won't accept work
• How many of each type of class I'm willing to teach per week (this ties in with variety)
• When my downtime is, including time with family, friends and the horse
• How many additional classes I'm willing to take on

Once you've agreed your boundaries with yourself it's important to stick to them. This will probably feel hard to begin with. I've been a people pleaser for most of my life and breaking that cycle of behaviour has been difficult, I promise that it does get easier with practice.

There are many creative ways of saying "No". Remember, you're not responsible for how other people receive that "No".

If you feel obliged to say "yes" but don't want to, take time to examine where that feeling comes from. It's likely to originate from an experience in your childhood that's become embedded in your subconscious and is running your behaviour on autopilot.

Call it out, deal with it and enjoy your new freedom!

3) Variety

I wholeheartedly support doing a wide variety of classes. 

When you do lots of different types of classes you learn diverse movement skills, which reduces the risk of structural overload and repetitive strain type injuries.

Humans like familiarity. When you do a lot of one type of class or one sport you'll tend to move your body in the same way every time you do that class or sport,

Muscles fire in the same old patterns, depleting the nerve and muscle cells and fatiguing the soft tissue fibres. 

Variety means you use different muscles in different ways, stimulating the somatosensory and sensory-motor cortex areas of the brain and improving the all important mind-body connection.

And, guess what, this improves awareness (see Tip1). Yes, everything is indeed linked!

Personally, I like to do no more than 3 to 4 of any one type of class per week. I currently teach 6x group cycling classes a week, which is too many! Ideally I'd prefer to teach 4x group cycling classes, but this is one of the downsides of teaching fitness full-time post-lockdown.

Of the 31 classes a week I teach, 12 are Yoga / Yoga Meditation / Pilates / Stretch and 5 are fitness mind-body (Les Mills BodyBalance and DL Spirit). The remainder are group cycling, Les Mills BodyPump, Les Mills Core, freestyle Strength & Conditioning (Body Conditioning) and a freestyle core.

4) Recovery - Sleep and metabolic health

This is a huge topic so I won't go into too much detail here.

With the amount of classes I do, fitness isn't a priority for me. And if you do 7 or more classes of medium to high intensity classes a week, like aerobics, LBT, circuits, bootcamp, strength training, body conditioning, Les Mills or group cycling, you'll be fit enough too!

At this level of physical activity recovery becomes more important.

I like to think of recovery NOT as cooling down after a workout but more as preparation for the next session.  You can't change the workout you've just finished but you sure can influence the next one.

As I said this topic is massive so here are some of the things I prioritise in my recovery strategies:

• Circadian rhythm - this influences pretty much every aspect of health
• Sleep quality and duration - there's plenty of evidence showing that 7-9 hours is optimal for most people. Less than 7 hrs or more than 9 hrs is associated with reduced health markers. Also aim to increase the % time spent in the restorative phases of sleep - deep SWS (slow wave sleep) and REM sleep - as this is when repair of muscles and DNA occurs and the brain detoxes.
• Gut health - gut wall integrity and brush border health to reduce inflammation and improve absorption of nutrients from food
• Gut microbiome diversity - more and more evidence is emerging of how important our gut microbiome is to how our body and brain functions, including your immune system. Certain keystone bacteria species can provide a surprisingly accurate indicator of long-term metabolic health.
• Blood glucose management - essential for metabolic health and how your body copes with physical activity
• Nutrition - this is highly individual.
• Hydration - as well as staying hydrated you can use soluble supplements such as electrolytes to support hard working muscles.

5) The right support network

There are no guarantees in life. When you're doing a high volume of physical activity regularly your body will often operating close to it's edge.

Having a good support network of physical therapists that I see consistently has been one of my essentials to staying injury free for many years.

Personally I see an osteopath and a level 5 clinical sports massage therapist every 12 weeks.

They help to keep my structures aligned and can provide an early warning of any changes.

I believe that you get the most benefit from physical therapy when you're an active participant in the process and collaborate with your therapist to mutually agree on a plan of action, rather than simply delegating all the responsibility of fixing you to your poor therapist.

Remember, structures like the pelvis and joints are controlled by muscles, which behave according to instructions they receive from the brain and nervous system.

If you're driving those structures with dodgy software it doesn't matter how often you see your therapist. Your body will keep getting unaligned and the same old niggles will continue to return a few weeks after the treatment. 

And yes, this ties back into awareness - tip 1.

Phew! That's an insight into how I stay injury free despite teaching 31 classes a week.

Remember there are no guarantees in life, and what works for one person may be less effective for someone else.

If in doubt, refer back to tip 1 - awareness!

NEXT STEPS

• Come to a Stretch, Yoga or Pilates class with me - here you can spend time observing how your body responds to different movements in a guided sequence
• Attend a half-day mind-body retreat - these are deeply relaxing, fun, social small group experiences typically held in various locations within easy reach of Worthing, West Sussex. The next one is on Sunday 10th September from 1pm to 5pm - bookings are open now (last 2x spaces available).
• Subscribe to my email list to receive "The Movement Chronicle", a weekly e-newsletter delivered directly into your inbox every Monday morning,
• Look out for a new short series of live workshops on movement - how to move away from pain, how to move with ease and confidence again and how to stay active even as you get older.....coming soon!

To find out more about my classes and retreats, or to join my email list you can contact me via any of these channels:

• Email at norma.pearson1@ntlworld.com
• DM me on Facebook Messenger 
• WhatsApp message to 07801 867361.