Photo by Vox Efx

Let’s talk about weight. Not the kind you lose, but the kind you lift to get stronger. We’ve got crossfitters, bootcampers, triathletes, marathoners, and just plain old gym rats all moving the heavy stuff around in an attempt to look good and be fit.

Really, we’re talking about any kind of resistance exercise, so this also applies to anyone using only their body weight as a means to build or maintain muscle. Hear that, all you yoga types?

Here’s the thing: as a doctor who sees all types of patients, and particularly working for 7+ years on elite athletes at the University of Texas, I’ve seen injuries in all shapes and sizes, and from any number of places. I have the “privileged” position of seeing exactly how athletes break — long before they reach the point of needing surgery or extensive rehab — more than just about any other kind of doctor out there.

Of all the injuries that I see, resistance exercise is the single most common cause, for any type of athlete.

Do I have your attention now?

There’s probably no greater routine risk to your exercise progress than putting yourself in the weight room, or into a movement designed to maximize your own body weight.

This doesn’t mean you should never engage in this kind of activity. The weight room is one of the most effective places to add strength and muscle mass. I do resistance training of some sort about 2-3 times a week, but I am also well aware of the risks, which are numerous.

These risks mean that resistance exercise should be performed with a healthy amount of respect. Let’s break that down.

Respect the Warmup

No muscle should ever be taxed when it’s cold. A quick 10-15 minutes of cardio will take care of this problem. This gets the blood flowing to your muscle fibers, and loosens up connective tissue that might be susceptible to injury.

I love to ride my bike down to the gym or the trail before doing resistance training. In transporting myself to my exercise locale, I’ve also warmed my muscles up for the activity. If you can’t do that, no problem. Once you’re at the gym, hop on a stationary bike, or hit the treadmill for a brisk walk or a light jog.

Respect the Exercise

No one is generally fit. All fitness is an adaptation our bodies make to a very specific activity under very specific parameters. This is why a very fit marathoner will still get sore from a long bike ride, or why you’ll still feel the training pains of a couple of sets of leg presses even though you’re used to doing squats.

To protect ourselves in the weight room, this means every activity should have its own warmup. Getting ready for a bench press set with 150 lbs? Do 1 set with 75 lbs first. About to do some single leg, body weight squats? Get yourself ready by performing the two-leg variety immediately before.

Respect Your Time

I know what you’re thinking. I have a limited amount of time to exercise, how do I fit in all these warmups?

The answer? You don’t fit it in. You remove all the extra stuff you’re doing so you have plenty of room on your workout schedule for what’s important.

Without getting into the nitty-gritty of planning an exercise routine, suffice it to say that the resistance training programs of 95% of exercising humans are horribly inefficient. They take too long and typically have far more exercises than needed to maintain or build fitness. My total workout time allotted to resistance training is about 35 minutes. This includes my general warmup, specific exercise warmups, the main sets of the exercises I do, and any cool down. As a naturally lean guy who has trouble putting on muscle, I’ve made steady gains for years now, where before I was struggling to maintain what I had.

If you’re looking for general health, strength, and fitness, aim for one set for each major body area (chest, legs, back, etc.) per workout. This doesn’t include your warmup sets.

Shorter workouts, fewer sets, more rest. It all equates to better gains. Strange but true. Don’t be afraid to embrace workout minimalism. It’ll save you time, help to protect you against injury, and restore your sanity around workout scheduling.

Respect Your Progress

A common thought about resistance training is that you have to go all out to make acceptable gains. In many training circles, it’s practically a badge of honor to wake up so sore the day after a hard workout that you have a hard time making it to the shower. Fitness buffs seem to beam with pride, regaling their colleagues with stories of how their arms were so sore they couldn’t even comb their hair. Taxing yourself to the point of immobility is not only foolish, it simply isn’t necessary for good, steady gains.

A workout doesn’t have to make you sore to make you stronger. Exercising beyond the point of where you would make notable progress – what might be called the Minimum Effective Dose ¹ – will frequently curtail your gains and put you at unnecessary risk for injury.

The irony is that it’s not the ones who hurt themselves the most that tend to make the most progress. The ones who achieve the highest levels of strength and fitness are the ones that survive long enough — free from sickness or injury — to make it there. How do you do this? You measure and temper.

You measure your progress, and temper your advancement.

Measuring your progress helps you stay injury free by giving you the knowledge, and freedom, to do less. If you track the number of reps and sets you perform and the amount of weight you use at each workout, you will get a regular update of whether you are making gains. In short: if you’re not making improvements in the amount of weight you can lift or the number of reps you can perform, there’s a reasonable chance that you’re doing something wrong.

If you’re training consistently (say, at least twice a week), but you aren’t making regular gains, the most common culprit is doing too much. Try backing off on the number of sets you perform, or the number of days you spend at the gym. Continue to track your progress, and see what happens.

Another key piece to weight room survival is tempering your advancement when you do make gains. It’s easy to dramatically increase the weight you use or the number of reps you might perform just to see what you can do, especially when you’re feeling spry or you’ve been lucky enough to make some gains. A word of advice: just take 10. Ten percent, that is.

You will save yourself a lot of trouble over the long haul by keeping any increases in weight, reps, sets, or even total workout time to no more than 10% of what you were doing previously. Ready to increase the weight on those leg extensions you were doing last week at 100 lbs? Don’t do more than 110 lbs today. If you can move 500 lbs with leg presses this week, don’t push it over 550 next time.

Many times, this might feel like a lot less than you could do. That’s the point. You’ll still make excellent gains, but you won’t put yourself into the red zone that puts you at risk of sickness or injury.

There’s that Ego Thing Again

Many of these injury-preventing tips are just about having good, safe habits. But many are also about taking your ego out of the picture. Most of us experience urges to do more with our exercise routine for all the wrong reasons. Vanity, insecurity, and impatience are certainly demons I’ve had to fight from time to time.

It’s easy to spend a lot of our exercise time worrying about what we think we should do, or even just what we want to do. If we center for a moment and realize that an exercise routine is really about systematically challenging what we can do, we’ll be better off for it, and we’ll make amazing progress in spite of ourselves.