What should I know about safe training?

Do you want more energy, to be in better shape and sleep better, without injuries or fear of overexertion? It’s possible, if we take into account certain things in our training.
Let’s look at these in more detail.

STABILITY AND MOBILITY

Stabilizer muscles and mobility form the basis of our fitness pyramid. When the lower part of the pyramid has more capacity than is required to maintain the body’s ability to perform, we stay healthy. If the pyramid is turned on its head, the body experiences additional stress and it causes different injuries and sprains.

Your body is only as strong as its weakest link. In order to be able to train with high intensity without breaking the body, the stabilizing muscles must be in good shape. If the support for our shoulder blades fails, the shoulders are elevated up toward the ears. At the same time the posture gets worse when the muscles that support the shoulder blades aren’t able to keep the shoulders in the right position. The shoulders turn forwards and that in turn tightens the chest muscles. A bad reaction from the deep abdominal muscles can on the other hand cause back pain when there is no timely support for the spine. These are just some of the reasons that speak for training our stabilizer muscles.

In addition to the stabilizer muscles we should pay attention to mobility. It doesn’t mean just a long trajectory or the ability to do a split; our bodies should be able to move in a relaxed way in every direction, we should be able to produce movement and the fascia should be moving. Research tells us that fascia have more nerves than any other tissue in the body. They control the order that our stabilizer muscles and strength muscles activate in by facilitating the systems that sense position and movement and timely activation of muscles. For all this to work, we need enough mobility to allow the stabilizer muscles to function optimally.

For mobility, we should combine different techniques: fascia exercises, submaximal contraction and contract-relax stretching techniques and ballistic stretches. These different techniques allow the body to start functioning like it’s meant to. Add to this some equipment (foam rollers, fascia balls and gun sha combs), and you can achieve even better results in mobility!

70% INTENSITY

When we exercise at an approximately 70% intensity, we fill the body with oxygen, which in turn increases vitality. The increase in energy helps us grow our potential. When we stay in this area, we don’t risk overloading the nervous system. In addition to the lower intensity exercises (aerobic exercise, 70% intensity), we also need higher intensity anaerobic exercise from time to time. It helps us burn momentary spikes in stress hormones caused by overexertion and remove them from the body. The most important thing in adjusting exercise is finding a suitable balance between high intensity training and lighter exercise so you can also recover from the training and hectic everyday life.

The stress from training should be considered together with all the stresses in our life. If our work is very stressful, we are busy day after day, and maybe there are some financial concerns, all these things cause psychological and emotional stress in the body. If we add to this hard, stressful exercise many times a week, our ability to handle stress is overwhelmed and the sympathetic nervous system becomes overactive.

You could think of the ability to handle stress like a cup. Up to some point it will hold the liquid (stress) you pour into the cup, but once the limit set by its volume (ability to handle stress) is reached and if you don’t stop pouring liquid into it, the cup will overflow (overexertion). To some extent stress is necessary, but once you go over a certain point, it will only be harmful. When the sympathetic nervous system is overactive, it affects our body negatively in many ways: digestion weakens, our sleep can be restless, recovery slows down and the body feels tight.

A good rule of thumb would be to do 70% of training with 70% intensity. That leaves room for the high intensity “real training” too. Take a look at your weekly training program. How many high intensity training sessions are included and how many of the sessions are lighter? This model that includes four different points has worked well when building the training sessions:

Good warm up with dynamic stretches, foam rolling, going through the trajectories needed for the exercises in the training session and light aerobic training. The warm up makes up around 20 minutes of the training session.

Warm up is followed by the training part, which takes up 20-30 minutes of a one hour training session.

After the training, active recovery will start to return the body to normal mode from the training mode.

Moderate intensity is used and the time used on this part is around 20 minutes.

The last part is a short relaxation.

ACTIVE RECOVERY

You know that progress is made during recovery, but often we still do another training session before the body has had time to recover from training. This stops the super compensation curve from rising properly and makes recovery and development slow. Eventually poor recovery might even cause negative results.

How can we recover better? In order to recover from training we need both active and passive recovery. Passive recovery means food and passive rest. During passive rest the brain operates at near to 8 Hz frequency and this state can be reached for example through meditation. Relaxation and meditation exercises should be done daily in order to help your body to recover from the hectic day and balance your
nervous system.

You can add active recovery into your training session by warming up and cooling down, for example by adding foam rolling and dynamic stretches. When you prepare the body for the upcoming training session and return it back from the training mode, you help it to recover from the actual training session. This is however not enough to help us recover from the overall stress in our lives, which is why we need to include light walks in nature, stretching, recovering foam rolling and massages into our weekly routine. In addition to these it is good to meet friends, go to the movies or theater and choose those things in your life that you enjoy!

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