Would You Like An Injury Proof Resilient Body?

Sounds like the dream right?

It’s well established that exercise and movement are proven ways to achieve a safe, comfortable and resilient body that helps you to feel great and keep participating in the activities that you love.

Unfortunately there is no such thing as completely “injury proof”

However, there is a lot that we can do that works towards prevention of injury, or ‘resilience’. Resilience is our ability to withstand whatever life can throw at us. Below are three things we can do to build our body’s resilience.

1. Sleep

Whilst to some this may still sound like a cop, out there is literally no other single thing you can do to help your body cope with whatever stressor you are going to throw at it be it physical or emotional during a given day. Sleep helps our body to rest and recover, keeps our bones strong (really!), keeps our immune system primed and our cognitive function at its best. If you aren’t consistently achieving seven hours of sleep each night this is a great place to start. It is important to acknowledge here that it isn’t always as simple as telling someone they need to sleep – there are often factors that make it hard to do so, small children, insomnia, certain medical conditions, and stress and anxiety. But if and where possible setting yourself up to at least have the opportunity to sleep for seven hours each night is a great starting place.

2. Strength

Most of the time we get injured because we have exceeded our body’s physical capacity; the simplest way to prevent this is to build strength. This will look different for everyone and be appropriate for different people in different ways, but by building the physical capacity of our bodies we build the ability of our joints, tendons and muscles to withstand loading.

3. Volume/Endurance

This is where most people come unstuck (running friends I’m looking at you here). Again we need to build our ability to tolerate a certain amount of something, whether it is holding a static position in a workplace for hours on end, or to run repeatedly without rest days in between – these things take a very gradual ramping up over a long period of time for our bodies to be able to withstand this without resulting in tissue breakdown or pain.

If we get these things right …

We might not be able to claim that we are fully “injury proof”, but we’ll be well and truly on the way to getting there. If you need a little help working this out; this is what we love doing best, or if you need a little tune up along the way that’s nothing to be too worried about, it is quite normal to develop little niggles as we test out where our capacity is!