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Welcome to 2020! The turn of the decade is exciting for everyone as new goals, jobs, and resolutions all start to kick into first gear. As physiotherapists, we always find it is a great time of year to help clients look ahead to achieving their goals.
If your New Year’s resolutions included improvements to your health, such as doing more exercise, here are five key pointers to look out for, how to make that resolution stick and what to avoid:
• Big goals take small steps. • Start slowly and be kind to your body. • Prepare for the preseason! • Be wary trying your child’s new toy/bike/skateboard/trampoline…you are older! • When it comes to DIY projects – know your limits.
Some of the most common injuries that we see in the first few months of the year often involve a sudden change in activity levels. These include lower back injuries, muscle strains (hamstrings, calf muscles), and Achilles tendon or shoulder injuries.
The human body is fantastic at adapting. The one catch is that we aren’t particularly good at adapting quickly. Hence the phrase, ‘big goals take small steps’.
The body takes time to condition itself to a new activity, behaviour or sport and ultimately turn it into a sustainable habit. Overuse injuries that involve the big tendons (think Achilles, patellar tendon, hamstrings, elbow) almost always involve a rapid change in load where the body has gone from not doing anything to suddenly doing too much.
One way to condition your body to a new activity is for the first 2-3 weeks, doing it less than what you intuitively think is necessary. A new gym membership might motivate you to go five times in the first week but this may lead to muscle or joint pain that will break the habit before it began. If instead the goal is to attend the gym three times each week, then the days in between will allow the body to recover, adapt and prepare for the next session.
If a new sport is the challenge that you have taken on board for 2020, then going into the preseason training with basic aerobic conditioning will help your body adapt to the more sports-specific loads. Even at the highest level of sport there are often injuries sustained in pre-season training camps that can often be avoided by a few weeks’ conditioning beforehand.
Finally, you might be surprised to learn that injuries sustained by enthusiastic parents when using their child’s new toy or trampoline are common and make for some of the more humorous descriptions on an ACC form. Have fun but remember your limits.
