As a trainer, one of the most common things to hear about it sore elbows and knees. Often times the comments come from athletes that have been around the track a few times and not only from folks just starting to work out. Besides a traumatic injury the most frequent reasons for injuries are overtraining and overuse. How do you fix those issues? You fix them by adding variety and rest to your training program.
Variety can come in a number of ways. The most obvious is exercise selection. If you have been doing only leg presses for months on end, then there is a strong probability that certain muscles are getting trained in the legs and others are falling behind. Done for a long period of time an imbalance can occur and this leads to injuries or at the very least, pain. What should be done in this case is to look at what imbalance is occurring and then pick another leg exercise which by its nature will help bring up the weak areas so you can avoid an injury.
This is why some of the sports performance training and core programs are so effective. They use whole body movements and seldom create a situation where one specific muscle gets overused creating the potential for injury. Training whole body movements, while not great from a bodybuilding specialization standpoint, is fantastic for creating a functional body that does well in day-to-day life and sports.
There are many other ways to add variety to your training program besides simply changing your exercises. You can change hand and grip positions as well as the angle of movement. An example of this would be bench presses. Change the grip and go a little more narrow stressing the triceps more than the chest but still stimulating the pushing muscles of the upper body. After that you could change the angle of the movement by doing the bench press on an incline bench thus stressing the upper chest and frontal shoulders a little more. The options are endless.
After grips and angles comes variety in set and rep schemes. You can see this factor hidden in three stage programs where it is called periodization. Every 3-4 weeks the set and rep schemes required by the program will change. This does several things. First it adds variety to keep the person training feeling motivated. Second, that variety in rep ranges will stress different parts of the nervous system as well as muscle fiber types. Third the change in volume or number of sets will allow periods of progress and rest for the bodies adaptation systems so that the immune system doesn’t get depressed resulting in over training or at the very least a few days off due to a random flu.
The last two variables I will mention are tempo and rest periods. Tempo refers to the length of time for the raising, lowering and pause in the contracted as well as stretched position of the movements. Most people when they train simply move the weight up and down and that’s about all the thought put into it. However there is a lot of variety to be found in rep tempo changes. Instead of the usual two seconds up, pause at the top, two seconds down, no pause at the bottom rep, try this. Raise the weight as fast as you can in good form, no pause at the top, lower for over a 5 count and pause at the bottom for a three count. Do three or 4 sets of that for 8-10 reps and see how you feel!
Rest periods are the kind of variety in a routine that can either get you stoked or broked. Bad English, but it rhymed so whatever. Most people will naturally rest between sets for between 2-3 minutes. Next time you are at the gym, wear a watch with a timer. Set the timer to beep at 45 seconds. No matter what, start your set when that beeper goes. Give it a try and learn to love variety in your training!
Ray L Burton is the owner of Buildingbodies Fitness Consultants. Being a personal coach over the years has led to a collection of self improvement articles that he has put together in the A-Z fitness guide FAT TO FIT