How to Avoid Injuries While Weightlifting, and How to Work Around Them

Avoiding injuries while weightlifting is ideal of course, but life happens, and you shouldn't let that get in the way of your progress. I want to go over my best tips for avoiding injuries while weightlifting, and also how to work around them when they occur.

Tips For Avoiding Injuries:

1. Make sure to take rest days.

Rest days are important for avoiding injuries. These are days off from the gym when you can be working on recovery; doing things like foam rolling, stretching, and eating enough protein to help your muscles rebuild. Light cardio is also something I would encourage doing on a rest day. I recommend taking 2-3 rest days per week; possibly 4 if you are a true beginner.

2. Work out in both higher and lower rep ranges.

I think of body-building and power-lifting as two opposing workout types in the gym. Body-building is focused on high reps with lower weight, while power-lifting is focused on low reps with higher weight. I believe that either type of training can wear down your body if you don't incorporate at least a little bit of training from the other side of the spectrum.

3. Have a good variety of exercises in your weekly routine.

It's good to make sure you are working out all different parts of your body equally in order to avoid compensation. I recommend making sure you have at least one single-arm and one single-leg exercise in your routine. This way you are able to work out some inequality between how much you use your stronger vs. weaker limbs. I would count a dumbbell upper-body exercise towards this category since you still have to stabilize two different implements. I would also try to have at least a few free-weight exercises in your routine, even if you tend to prefer machines. These types of exercises will help you focus on creating better core stability, as opposed to machines, which already have a lot of stability built into them.

4. Build your weight up slowly.

Don't try to make crazy jumps in weight every week, just think about slow progression upwards. You might hit set backs on certain days if you didn't get enough sleep, you're recovering from illness, you didn't eat enough, etc., and this is ok too! Always try to respect where your body is at on each given day that you are working out.

Tips For Working Out Through Injuries:

1. Don't do anything that creates more than a 3/10 level pain.

If you would rate your pain higher than a 3/10 (10 being the highest) on a pain scale, this is probably something you should avoid doing or at the very least modifying. If you can, first try to find a way that lowers the pain where you can still give your body a similar stimulus. For instance, if bodyweight squats are causing you excessive knee pain, try going down less far, using a box for your hips to aim towards, or using a TRX band to utilize some upper-body assistance.

2. Work out the body parts that you can.

Are you dealing with a shoulder injury? Maybe working out that limb is not possible at the moment, but you can still do lower-body machines, free-weight exercises with your other arm (yes, this is ok to do in the short-term; there have been studies proving this will actually help your other limb neurologically), or core exercises like laying leg raises or sit-ups. There is usually something you can do. It's best to put your focus towards that instead of all of the things that you can't do at the moment.

3. Increase difficulty and weight a little bit at a time.

As your injury is dissipating, start getting over some of the mental hurdles. You will need to start adding weight back onto your exercises a little bit at a time, which is usually more mentally challenging than just physically challenging. Try adding on 1-5 lbs. to your exercises every week as things are feeling better. This also might mean slowly going back to exercises that once caused you pain. Maybe pull-ups were causing you shoulder pain at one point. I would start with lat pull-downs, then assisted pull-ups, dead hangs & scapular pull-ups, and finally attempting a bodyweight pull-up again.

I hope this is helpful in getting you back into the gym if you've been dealing with an injury, as well as helping you come up with programming that will help you towards avoiding them as much as possible. If you are new to the gym, check out our beginner strength training program, Motion Ready, which will give you all of the tools you need in the gym to feel confident and avoid injuries.