How to Stave off Injury and Live Pain-free Forever

In order to avoid injury we need to first understand how it happens. Here’s an oversimplified math equation to help you understand better…

Injury = Force > Capacity

In short, injury happens when when we apply more force (load) than our body’s tissues can handle.

Our bodies are always looking to be efficient, and use energy as little as possible, so they do this super fun thing where they only keep the stuff you actually use. So if you aren’t using your joints in certain ranges, or your muscles and connective tissues in certain ways.. say goodbye to all that over time.

Therefore even if you don’t care about improving your body and your capacity (though I don’t know why you wouldn’t), you need some degree of loading even just to keep it the same and not lose mobility and function over time.

Now that can be a lot to take in, and maybe you don’t even know where to begin and we’ve only got so much time and energy in a day.. so to help you figure out what to prioritize I present to you..

A Super Reasonable Hierarchy For Building Better Humans

So this hierarchy isn’t really a hierarchy in that working on some areas will improve other areas and vice versa. But in general spending more of our limited time and energy improving areas closer to the base will help us to better support areas higher up and more generally improve our resilience to injury and pain.

If this already sounds like a lot of work don’t worry, I will give you some ideas of how to fit this into your busy life and schedule as we go.

Now let’s break this down!

The Environment: Basic Human Needs

Most of these things are probably really obvious but improving things like our nutrition, hydration, sleep, security, self-esteem have important impacts on our entire body’s resilience and are most definitely worth spending time and energy improving. These things all affect the environment of our body and help to keep us nourished and functioning our best. If we are lacking in these areas it can be hard enough to recover from the normal stresses of life.

The Power Source: Energy Systems Training

Our body has a few different energy systems so spending time exercising at different intensities is helpful for our health. Improving our engine allows us to perform work better and recover better from exercise. Lower intensity exercise is usually longer in duration and could involve adding short walks throughout your day, or potentially jogging or hiking for some people. Higher intensity exercise is shorter in duration and might involve lifting (relatively) heavy weights or some kind of sprinting

The Hardware: Internal Training

A grossly neglected type of training specifically focused on building and maintaining our joint spaces, connective tissue (tendon, ligament, fascia, etc) quality and quantity, and muscle size and type.

I try to share information as best as I can relating to this domain on my platforms and find when people are having pain or injury this is commonly an area we can make improvements in. Working as a physiotherapist I give people a lot of homework in this realm.

This isn’t the post to dive too deeply into this domain but as a quick tip if you aren’t already a good place to start is by moving all of your joints through their full ranges of motion at least once a day (or more).

The Software: External Training

Now this is the area when you think of activities of life and “exercise” that you typically will think of. It includes everything where the goal is completing a task so it could be the task of squatting, running a certain distance, doing a down dog, playing some kind of sport, etc. This type of training allow us to get more efficient at using certain body tissues for performing tasks. It may improve some of the other domains further down the pyramid but does so indirectly.

We can think of this section as “functional training” ie. push, pull, hinge, squat, throw, whatever else, or “sport-specific training”.

Now I love this training domain but if you find yourself doing a lot of stuff here, and ending up with injury and pain, you would be well served spending more time on stuff lower down on the pyramid.

I find this pyramid helpful for determining where I could best prioritize spending my time and energy when it comes to maintaining my health.

You DO NOT need to hit everything every day nor could you if you tried.

You also don’t need to do this all as part of one exercise session, adding in “movement snacks” to your day when convenient can be an effective way of getting a better variety of movement in.

It has been a game changer in prioritizing exercise for myself and for my patients.

If you’ve made it to the end thank you for reading! Reach out if you have questions or would like to discuss further.