3 Ways to Avoid Weekend Warrior Injuries
Posted on: May 19, 2014Categories: LiveWell 24/7What is a weekend warrior? It’s a person who is inactive during the week, and squeezes in all of their physical activity during the weekend. Weekend warriors can be in seemingly perfect shape, at a healthy weight with good muscle tone. But because of inactivity during the week, they greatly increase the risk for injury on the weekend. The statistics are staggering on exercise and sport-related injuries. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) 11,000 Americans visit emergency rooms for sports and exercise-related injuries on a daily basis. In fact, one in six visits to the ER is for a sports or exercise-related injury. So what can you do to avoid weekend warrior syndrome?
Prevention Is The Best Resort
The best prevention is by fitting in physical activity throughout the week. If you simply can’t find the time to go to the gym during the week, you can benefit from small steps to improve your muscle fitness. Ten minutes in the morning and evening to stretch can keep your muscles limber. Taking the stairs, or walking to lunch rather than driving, can increase your activity enough that your muscles don’t atrophy during the workweek. Even small increments of physical activity and movement can help to reduce injury. If you’ve ever ‘thrown your back out’ from a simple bend or sprained a muscle from something as simple as twisting your torso, you have probably wondered how such a painful injury was possible from such a simple movement. That’s because you could have unknowingly experienced multiple micro traumas over time, that left untreated can result in sports injuries. Regular chiropractic adjustments can correct spinal and joint alignment so that joints, ligaments and muscles don’t get stressed to the point of an injury from a simple movement.
Start Slowly
Weekend warriors are often injured because they’ve been inactive for a period of time, such as winter, and then on the first beautiful spring day, they hit the tennis court for hours, or strap on the bike helmet and ride for miles. While they are playing they might not experience pain, but by the next day, their muscles are definitely talking to them. To prevent this, it’s important to start slowly after periods of inactivity. If you sign up for a marathon in six months, don’t expect to go run for an hour on your first day of training. You need to condition your muscles and heart to work up to vigorous training.
Warm Up Before All Activities
You’ll often see people stretching by touching their toes before starting to play a sport. But static stretches don’t work as well as dynamic stretching for preventing injuries. A dynamic stretch is one that moves your body through a sport-specific movement to prepare your body for the activity. So if you’re playing baseball, slow movement spinal twists would be good to prepare for swinging the bat. YouTube is an excellent resource to find dynamic stretching instructions for virtually any sport. http://www.bothachiropractic.com/guide/3-ways-to-avoid-weekend-warrior-injuries
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