Right Fit Blog

Rolling right along. We have the third tip for staying safe and avoiding injury while choosing a routine.

Tip #3: Let Your Body Do The Work

Your time in the gym is not actually when you gain muscle. 

Obvious sentence, but let it sink in. You are actually gently injuring yourself in the gym, and lifting weights is reducing your body’s muscles to the point of cell death. It is encouraging your body’s natural immune response to rebuild tissue at a greater volume with new resources. 

That means that for the first few hours, or even days, after you hit a great workout, you have to respect the fact that your body is INJURED. 

If you pull a back muscle lifting a TV, you lie down and heat/ice it. You don’t go play golf or install a desk that day. If your knee pops from stepping off a curb at the wrong time, you must elevate and rest the injury. If you play soccer that same day, it will just swell up and get worse, and increase the amount of time that injury hurts. 

If you do 90 bicep curls, your body will need to rebuild that muscle group because it is GONE. You destroyed it, and it is injured. Gently, of course, but it is quite literally a torn muscle group. Let the fibers reconnect, rest and prioritize other things besides physical activity on your off days. 

That also goes back to the first two tips. Understand that a five or six day workout routine is not normally for building muscle, it’s for activating athletic resilience. That’s why so many workout routines isolate muscle groups on specific days, rather than whole body training. The cutting edge of fitness training has a whole slew of strategies, from whole body to isolation, and you have to know what will work for you and what won’t. 

Either way, let your body work. Take days off, eat healthy, and rest the injury. 

This is where the difficult truth of exercising comes into play: What you do to prepare for working out outside of the gym matters more than what happens inside. Schedule, eating, hydration and work all effect your recovery and preparation, and knowing when you are not read for a hard workout day, and when you need to hit it even harder, is key to maintaining gym health.