How An Intense Workout Session Can Be Damaging Your Body
It’s typical with overcompensating. You say to yourself: Right, I’ll go for a run this week, fit in a yoga class and some Pilates, and take the bike out for a spin on the weekend. When other things inevitably get in the way however, it can be easy to miss out on most of what you had been intending to put into practice, and you end up overcompensating with an intense workout to make up for lost time. This isn’t always the best idea though, for a number of reasons.
If it has been a while since you last put yourself through your paces, the body is much less used to heavy physical exertion, and you will notice the difference. It is similar to a lot of things in life where your aim to teach yourself new tricks. If you wanted to learn a new language for example, it is much more beneficial to try and spend a few minutes a day practicing and getting used to it, rather than cramming it all into one day. It is much more likely that you will end up forgetting more of the new material if you do this, as opposed introducing it to yourself gradually.
It works much the same way for your body during a workout, and by fitting high-intensity training into your schedule without making adequate preparations, the body will not be able to cope as effectively.
The workouts that typically lead to injuries and side effects from a heavy regime are those that involve particularly strenuous, high-intensity interval training (HIIT) routines, as these are the exercises which do not give your body appropriate time to recover in between all of these hardcore sets. Other problems stem from the general fact that when you rush something, you will usually spend less time considering what you are doing, and just go ahead and do it.
This is an issue because it can lead to form and technique being nothing more than an afterthought, and inevitably, if you follow a workout that doesn’t allow you to align your body correctly, it can cause all sorts of chaos for your muscles. If the muscles are not properly stretched out before you start your workout session, they have more work to do trying to stay in shape. If your muscles are not particularly flexible and feel stiff, this only increases the chance of pulling a muscle – or even worse – tearing one.
It isn’t all bad news though, of course. There are many ways to successfully carry out these workouts on a regular basis and end up with great results – but this is only possible if you prepare your body beforehand. Warming up is key to all of this, and something you have no doubt constantly heard of without necessarily heeding the warnings. By engaging with something as simple and relatively quick as a 10 minute warm up, where you perform stretches with all the key muscles and loosen them up enough, it can help a great deal when trying to prevent problems such as delayed-onset muscle soreness (DOMS), which will help you to feel a lot better the day after!
Muscle problems are obviously incredibly annoying, and even painful, but they can pale in comparison to some of the really nasty injuries you can contract with a high-intensity session should your body not be ready for it. Spinal injuries and trapped nerves are some of the sharpest, most debilitating issues you can unfortunately end up with if you push yourself too hard and too fast. If you have been unlucky enough for this to happen to you though, it isn’t going to afflict you forever. Plenty of recovery methods are around to relieve these types of problems before they go too far, such as non-surgical procedures available from Healthquest Chiropractic and other injury specialists who have developed effective methods to aid recovery.
Other ways to aid your recovery after a heavy workout session may seem like some of the most basic, but this often leads to them being overlooked. Water is a great example that many forget about. Listen to your body and make sure you hydrate when feeling thirsty to help your body function at its best.
So remember, before you set off on some serious quests to attain fitness as quickly as possible, if you don’t prepare yourself for what is to come, you could end up with the kind of injury that just won’t go away – and this might mean that it will take even longer to reach the fitness levels you are looking for.
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