01 May 7 Things To Consider When Revisiting a Sport
STUDENT QUESTION:
Help! I practice yoga regularly, but I recently decided start running again, which I haven’t done in a few years. It’s been several weeks now, and I’m still experiencing major muscle soreness with the addition of running to my weekly regimen. What are some things to consider when re-visiting a sport or physical activity you haven’t done in a while, and how can I best avoid injury?
ADAM ANSWERS:
1. Point to remember: We do not improve from the exercise we do. We improve when our bodies recover from the training. Our muscles grow stronger. Our nervous system gets faster. We build more energy creating mitochondria (one bit of jargon won’t hurt) to feed our cells. Our brains develop muscle “memory” to improve efficiency. Our bones get denser and circulation increases. All of these changes take a LOT of time and it is recovery time that prevents injuries.
2. Proper dosing is more important initially. Any time you start a new activity, soreness increases to protect you from injury. If you don’t dose properly, you get more sore and eventually that becomes pain or worse: real INFLAMMATION.
3. Do: Start slower than you think you should, even if you are an amazing Yogi, you are not ready to go run even a 5K to start. Exercise of one type does not transfer over to the others even though we want it to.
4. Don’t work so hard that you are so sore the next day you can’t move. This is NOT what is necessary to start a new exercise or activity. In fact, if you are sore and have that feeling of sandpaper in your muscles, you did too much and need to rest and recover for no less than 5 days with active movement of the tissues that feel like this. In five days time if you are not sore anymore (wait longer if you must) cut the intensity by at least half. If you wake up without soreness, congratulations, you are not going to get hurt.
5. Once you have consistently been doing this new activity and have not gotten hurt for six months, you can increase intensity and cause some next day delayed onset soreness safely.
6. Don’t stretch before resistance training or running. Use active warm ups with very light intensity! Warm up for at least 10 minutes before and then give your body 3 to 5 minutes to improve circulation to the tissues you are about to use.
7. Water intake:
a.Do not drink eight, eight ounce glasses of water per day. This was based off of food intake and fluid intake and coffee/tea/kombucha etc. count even if they are causing you to pee more because someone told you they were a diuretic. Too much water and too much sweating can combine to create a life threatening event called Hyponatremia. This is when your body cramps because you don’t have enough salt in your system to keep your muscles contracting. (Including your heart).
b.Electrolytes for long runs or hot yoga are important for all types of muscles including your heart. Please make sure you have adequate salt intake and take an electrolyte pill before and during if you are still drinking too much water as stated above.
c.Sweating while doing hot yoga and drinking gallons of water while eating more with food without electrolytes is the issue. Muscles fire from sodium and potassium ion channels and magnesium is in there too. When you don’t have enough in the blood from diluting it with too much water and sweating it out, you can’t contract OR relax the muscles.
Want help with injury prevention or rehab?
- 7 Things To Consider When Revisiting a Sport - May 1, 2017
- What pain should I get checked out? - April 5, 2017
- 7 Tips For Cross-Training Your Yoga Practice - March 4, 2017
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