Tips for returning back to the gym
- Start with a longer warm-up: It’s important to warm-up our bodies, especially
during these chilly winter months. Spending an extra 10 mins of stretching or cardio
heightens your blood flow and reduces chance of injury. - Bump down the weight: Although you might want to look like Arnold
Schwarzenegger, it would be ideal to reduce the weight that you would usually lift.
Considering it’s been sometime since many have been to the gym, reducing the
weight will help avoid potential injury and over exertion. - Reduce the repetitions: While us physios are usually really bad at keeping count of
repetitions, we know it’s important to start off with fewer repetitions as we return
to the gym. Easing up our repetitions ensures that you’re not pushing yourself too
far and assists in reducing potential injuries. - So I need to have good technique before I even lift the weight?: Weight training has
many benefits such as building muscle mass, getting callouses on your hands,
awkwardly making eye contact with someone when looking at the mirror and most
importantly, it helps you lift the weight off the rack properly. That’s why it’s
important to use a safe lifting technique to pick a weight off the rack because you
don’t want to get injured before actually doing the exercise. - Your mother’s favourite advice….rest: It’s important to know your limitations when
returning to the gym so having an adequate amount of rest days is vital. A good
system would be to have at least one day in between gym sessions at the very least.
We would usually encourage everyone to attend the gym frequently, but we’re
letting you off the hook this time. - Wait, for how long?: Returning to your usual workout will take some time as you will
need to gradually warm up to it. We recommend implementing these tips for 3
weeks before returning to normal. If it makes it easier, just think of it as 1,814,400
seconds or just watching 1,512 episodes of Seinfeld.
In the case that you either feel sore, excessively fatigued or have a lot of tension in your
muscles, we have a variety of tools to help relieve these symptoms such as the theragun,
shockwave therapy and digging our elbows into you.
