5 Tips To Avoid Injury

Physiotherapists, and anyone for that matter, cannot completely prevent injuries. It is simply impossible to control every variable that contributes to injury. When we talk about injury prevention, what we really mean is reducing your injury risk and improving your body’s resilience through targeted physiotherapy and structured rehabilitation.

How To Reduce Your Risk Of Injury

If we can't prevent injuries, what can we do? Reduce your risk of injury. Here are my five tips to avoid injury.

1) Get Assessed Before Training

A physiotherapy assessment is the first step in understanding how well your body moves and identifying potential injury risks. This gives us an opportunity to identify areas for improvement, such as muscle weakness, joint stiffness, and tight muscles. Simply put, does your body have what it takes to train without getting injured?

If I were to give you corrective exercises without an assessment, the likelihood of you doing the right things is slim. With an assessment, we know exactly what exercises to do to help you the most. 

Some of the big things I look for when assessing a client are:

1. Do you have pain with certain movements?

2. Do you have sufficient range of motion based on your training style?

3. Do you have sufficient strength required by your style of training?

I can’t know any of that without an assessment.

Now, here’s the thing. Based on what you find during the assessment, the exercises I give you will be part of your warm-up; this is what we call exercise-based rehabilitation physiotherapy, which targets movement weaknesses before they develop into injuries.

I know a lot of the time, people think the exercises they’re given have to be done in place of their training session, or that they need to train more just to fit in all their corrective exercises.

Luckily, that is not the case. Your warm-up is the best time to perform your corrective exercises.

2) Warm Up Based On Your Movement Needs

Warm-ups are the best way to prepare your body for the upcoming training session. There are two things you should look to accomplish with each warm-up:

1. Prime movements

2. Increase heart rate and blood flow

But, there’s more to it than just those two things.

Warm-ups should also address the findings from your assessment and the areas that need improvement. When a warm-up is done correctly, it should look to address:

1. Activate/strengthen weak muscles

2. Increase joint mobility

3. Increase muscle flexibility

4. Prime movements specific to the session

5. Increase heart rate and blood flow

That may seem like a lot to do, but it's easily attainable with an efficient, targeted program. You’re already warming up, so it’s just a matter of ensuring you’re doing the right things.

Now, I hate to break it to you, but the warm-up you’re doing as part of the class is not enough. The class warm-up is for the general person, not someone managing shoulder pain, knee pain, hip pain, back pain, or neck pain. That’s how it has to be. It’s impossible to cater each warm-up to each individual in the class. You need to do your own 10 - 15-minute warm-up each session.

What should you be doing as part of your warm-up? Get assessed. That’s the best way to ensure you’re doing the right exercises for yourself.

3) Leave Your Ego At The Door

Progress in the gym comes from consistent, small changes. When you walk into the gym thinking every session will equate to a new PB, you increase your risk of burnout and injury. Adding 10-20kg to the bar every session or every week may work for a while, but it won’t last.

When we let our egos influence our choices, we start making poor decisions. This is one of the most significant issues I see in the gym. It doesn’t just have to be choosing a weight on the bar; it could even be Rx’ing a workout when you should have scaled. Or even training on a day you should be resting.

For many, it’s not asking for help when you need it the most. You know what I mean, that annoying shoulder pain you get after pullups, knee ache after wall balls, etc. Ignoring it and hoping it goes away only results in a worse problem 6-months later.

You may be thinking, “Why does it matter? I train because I enjoy it, not to be a CrossFit Games athlete?” I get it, maybe your goals aren’t necessarily performance-based. Regardless of the reason why you train, you certainly need to be able to do it for a long time.

The best way to ensure you’re able to train long-term is to progressively build strength and capacity using principles similar to return-to-sport rehabilitation. One of the best ways to do that is to make small, consistent changes. It takes months to years for you to actually increase your strength or see positive changes to your performance, not days to weeks.

Remember this the next time your ego tells you to add more weight to the bar:

1. Small, consistent changes create big change

2. Don’t be afraid to scale the workout - you’re training because you enjoy it

3. Technique and quality movement always trump quantity

4. Even niggles need to be addressed, don’t be afraid to ask for help

4) Listen To Early Warning Signs

There is a big difference between a niggle and an injury. Niggles are typically low-intensity aches or pains that appear intermittently and may not immediately affect performance. They don’t usually hinder your movement performance much. Injuries are long-lasting and much more severe, with greater intensity and a greater impact on how you move/perform.

With such a big difference between the two, it’s pretty easy to know whether you’ve got a niggle or an injury. Niggles seem like they’re not that big of a deal, probably something that doesn’t need to be addressed, right? It’ll go away on its own, soon, right?

That’s the problem. Niggles are usually something that doesn’t impact you much, to the point where you don’t notice them that often. Maybe your shoulder only hurts after a specific movement in the gym. Your knee hurts only after doing a certain number of squats. So what’s the big deal?

It’s what’s happening behind the scenes that is of genuine concern. Even though the pain is minimal and you don’t think there is any real hindrance to your movement and performance, there is. Your body can avoid pain and work around a problem without you even noticing it. It changes which muscles work, how much they contract, and how much they can move. This is how your body compensates.

These compensations are usually the hardest thing to treat, not the niggle that started it all in the first place. Imagine you’ve been dealing with shoulder pain for just over a year now. I know that may seem like a ridiculously long time, but that’s usually the average time it takes for symptoms to go untreated. Your body has developed compensation patterns and gotten really good at them because it’s been doing so for a while now.

So, how do you know when that niggle needs to be addressed? If it’s a low-intensity pain that doesn’t impact your performance, it’s probably not something to worry about, if it’s not a recurring issue. A low-intensity pain that presents while you’re training, preventing you from performing as you did previously, or that recurs, needs to be addressed. 

You can always spot someone in the gym dealing with a niggle. They jump down from the rig after doing pull-ups and rub their shoulders or do arm circles. They grab their lower back after deadlifts. Maybe they insist on wearing knee sleeves because their knees hurt without them. Those are all signs that the niggle is causing issues and needs to be addressed.

5) Prioritise Recovery To Support Training

Training is stressful. Not in a way that you feel stressed out during or after, but how your body perceives exercise. Regardless of the type of training, frequency, intensity, or anything else, your body sees exercise as stress. In fact, stress is one of the main reasons why you get fitter and stronger. You stress the body to a point where it forces adaptation, so it comes back better than before.

Unless that is, you’re not recovering well enough. Too much stress can have a negative impact. Muscles and ligaments can tear, and bones can break. Too much stress and not enough recovery is where niggles start, and injuries happen.

Effective Recovery Strategies

The best way to manage the effects of stress is to focus on your recovery. Luckily, there are many ways you can do this:

1. Active recovery, such as walking

2. Foam rolling and release work

3. Stretching or yoga

4. Mindfulness

5. Sleep

6. Nutrition

Sleep and nutrition are perhaps the most important. Sleep is where true recovery occurs, and nutrition is where you get the fuel to train and recover. Outside of those, one commonly used recovery strategy is foam rolling, although it should be used as part of a broader recovery and rehabilitation plan.

The benefits of foam rolling aren’t just to increase joint mobility or muscle flexibility, but it can also help your recovery! Foam rolling is great for:

1. Decreasing post-workout soreness

2. Warming up before training

3. Cooling down after training

4. Improving how well you move

How do you know if you need to recover more? If you feel like each session leaves you feeling beat up and sore, you need to recover more. If you struggle to get out of bed in the morning or lack the energy to train hard, you need to recover more. If you’re constantly dealing with one ache or another, those niggles that just won’t go away, you need to focus more on your recovery.

Reduce Injury Risk With A Structured Physiotherapy Plan

Physiotherapy helps identify movement limitations, strength deficits, and training risk factors while building resilience through structured rehabilitation and progressive loading.