The Secret to Pain-Free Exercise

[Guest Prosoft Admin]

The Secret to Pain-Free Exercise

The other day I was talking to a patient about a topic I know can help many of you out there too!

She was telling me that doing lunges for her exercise video at home was causing knee pain. "Beth" had given up on exercising because she just couldn't figure out how to get around the pain during and after doing her fitness routine.

Here's a HUGELY helpful trick to increase your odds of success: OBJECTIFY your exercise.

What does that mean you say? Well, think of it this way - DEFINE your problem exercise in a bunch of different ways. Doing this suddenly gives you a number of different TWEAKS you can do to try to downsize the stresses so that you don't hurt.

Let's take a look at the lunges that were hurting Beth as an example. It's hard to figure out what to change when you just think "lunges." But, here's what Beth needed to do....DEFINE IT. How heavy, how far, how deep, what angle is the step at, how many, how much rest between...etc.

So, she said:

• I put 90% of my weight on that leg when I lunge.
• I step out about 3 feet on my lunge
• I bend my knee down to about 90 degrees
• I step out to the front, the side and backwards
• I do 60 lunges on each leg during my 30 min DVD
• Between every 15 lunges per leg I switch to upper body or core work for 6 minutes before resuming the lunges

Now Beth has a whole list of possible TWEAKS she can use to lessen her knee stresses during those lunges. Let's take a look at some options:

• She reduced to only 70% of her weight on the lunging leg
• She stepped out only 2.5 feet for a shorter lunge
• She did a shallower lunge to only 60 degrees of bend
• She only did side lunges because those were not painful once she paid close attention
• She slowed down and only did 10 lunges where before she did groups of 15 lunges before a break
• She added some more core/upper body work between lunge sets so that her knees got 10 minutes rest before lunging again

Now of course each person's example would be unique to only them and this is not specific to any of you out there. But it gives you a new set of thoughts as to how OBJECTIFYING your exercise in a number of ways can provide you with some previously unrecognized ways to downsize the stresses that contribute to your pain.

I hope that helps. If you have any specific questions about pains or troubles you're having please call us. We're here to help you! And if you have any friends or family that you know could use this advice feel free to pass this along to them. Or better yet - have them give us a call and we can try to get them back to Peak Performance!