The nice weather has graced us with its presence. So let’s all get outside. It has been a crazy long winter, made worse with the restrictions in place due to COVID 19. Now that the sun is warm and the days are longer, we can finally get outside and run/ride/skateboard/rollerblade etc. Whatever your sport this is the most common time to create an overuse injury.
It really isn’t that hard to not get injured, but our desire to enjoy the nice weather for the limited time that we have it is overwhelming and will get the better of most of us. I am totally guilty of this and have had my fair share of injuries from getting on my bike in the spring after a winter off and riding for 3 hours only to end up with an IT Band injury that puts me out for the next two weeks. The problem isn’t that the sport I chose to do was bad, but more that I wasn’t physically prepared to do it at that volume.
There are two main areas that you can focus on to prepare your body for spring time exercise. Muscular strength and joint mobility. Both of these are important to prevent injury when you first get outside for exercise in the nice weather.
Muscular strength is focused mainly on accessory muscles. An accessory muscle isn’t the big muscles that drive movement like your quadriceps or hamstrings, but smaller muscles such as your gluteus medius muscle that provinces stability to the hip or your rotator cuff muscles that stabilize your shoulder. Regardless of the exercise that you do, there are accessory muscles that you can strengthen. Taking the time to work on these muscles over the winter is not overly time consuming, but can pay dividends when you get outside. Taking the hip for example. Doing gluteus medius strength work (leg raise, clam shell) can help to prevent IT band syndrome or trochanteric bursitis; two common injuries in runners when they start putting in larger miles outside.
Joint mobility is the focus on overall range of motion of a specific joint. Most of our lives we spend with our joints either moving in a limited range, or only in one plane of movement. Most of our joints though are capable of large ranges in multiple planes of movement. The less we use the ranges on a consistent basis, the more restriction is put in place by your body to only do the limited ranges that we do on a regular basis. This is an adaptive mechanism that will actually harm us, the longer we limit movement of a joint. The best way to prevent this is to stay active year round, and to do a variety of sports. The best activity to help with overall joint mobility is Yoga. In the age of YouTube and online fitness this is easily accessible and merely requires taking action to start.
I have attached a few video links to this blog post showing common muscular strength exercises for commonly neglected accessory muscles, and a few joint mobility exercises. Every person is different, but spending the time to strengthen and create mobility before you head outside and pile on the hours of activity can save you from pain and from time spent sitting on the sidelines when you could be out shredding trails with your friends.
Dr. Adam Wade
Dr. Adam Wade 