How To Train Intensely Without Wrecking Yourself In The Process

I’m encouraged by what appears to be an increase in public awareness and media discussion of the high risk of orthopedic injuries and dangerous medical conditions like rhabdomyolysis with popular exercise programs like CrossFit and many so-called “boot camps”, however, it bothers me that ignorant trainers and journalists frequently blame exercise intensity for problems caused by things like poor exercise selection and bad form.

High Intensity Versus High Risk

In the context of exercise intensity is best defined as relative effort; how hard you are working relative to how hard you are capable of working at the moment. For example, if you are capable of exerting one hundred units of force in an exercise and perform it with a level of resistance which only requires you to exert sixt units, at the start of the exercise your intensity of effort will only be sixty percent. As you fatigue the force you are capable of exerting gradually decreases so the sixty units of force you exert gradually becomes a larger percentage of your momentary capability. When fatigue has reduced your momentary capability to sixty units of force you will be working at maximum intensity.

Injuries occur during exercise when tissues are exposed to more force than they can withstand, which can be due to any one or a combination of of several factors. The higher the force relative to your tissue strength the higher your risk of injury. While training with a high level of intensity requires a high relative effort, it does not require relatively high levels of force. By consistently applying the following guidelines you can train as intensely as you are capable of without wrecking yourself in the process.

Use a slow, controlled speed of movement

You should move slowly enough during exercise to be able to do three things:

1. Reverse direction smoothly and with little acceleration during both the lower and upper turnarounds
2. Maintain proper positioning and path of movement over the full range of motion
3.  Focus on intensely contracting the target muscles.

Reversing directly smoothly, gradually slowing to a stop and gradually starting the positive or negative without bouncing, yanking, or jerking the weight reduces the peak force the target muscles encounter. This is especially important during the lower turnaround, because more force is required to slow the weight to a stop and to begin the positive, and in many exercises the target muscles may be at or near a stretched position where they are weaker and more vulnerable to injury.

For most exercises this means taking at least four seconds to complete the positive (lifting) phase and another four seconds to complete the negative (lowering) phase, but moving even more slowly improves control of body positioning and movement and minimizes acceleration during the turnarounds.

Contrary to uninformed opinion it is not necessary to move in a fast, explosive manner during exercise to improve your speed or explosiveness in other activities or to accomplish any general fitness goals, and doing so unnecessarily increases your risk of injury. Regardless of the speed of movement used to develop strength, if you get stronger, you will able to move faster and more explosively.

It is also not necessary to move quickly or perform a high rate of mechanical work during exercise to improve metabolic and cardiovascular conditioning. As long as your metabolic work is high you will stimulate improvements in these, and this can be accomplished moving slowly, or even not at all with isometric high intensity training methods and by minimizing your rest between exercises. Avoiding a high amount of mechanical work done in an explosive, high-force manner also reduces your risk of rhabdomyolysis (breakdown of muscle releasing muscle fiber contents into the blood which can be harmful to the kidneys), a condition which occurs with alarming frequency in people doing CrossFit.

Maintaining proper positioning and path of movement prevents you from moving into or through positions where the joints or other tissues are exposed to potentially harmful levels of force due to compression or stretching of tissues. Maintaining proper positioning also ensures the target muscles are being efficiently loaded, rather than offloading to other muscle groups. This prevents you from generating a lot of force with other larger muscle groups that must be transmitted to the weight through smaller muscle groups, which increases your risk of injury.

Exercise is not about using your muscles to lift weights, it is about using weights to work your muscles. When performing an exercise your focus should be internal rather than external, focusing on intensely contracting the target muscles rather than what you are doing to the weight or the handles, pedals, or pads on a machine. It is much easier to do this when you are moving slowly.

Avoid movements or positions which cause excessive stretching or compression of joint tissues

Your muscles and tendons can only stretch so far, and your joints can only move so far in any direction before tissues start to be compressed and/or stretched to a potentially harmful degree. While a moderate stretch is desirable in some exercises an extreme stretch puts the muscles under load in a weak and vulnerable position increasing the risk of strains or tears and can be harmful to your joints.

If you study ju jitsu, chin na, dumog, or any other style of grappling which involves joint locks and breaks, you learn how to position and apply force to a threat’s joints to cause pain or damage, and how to prevent them from doing the same to you. The basic principles are the same for almost every lock; you move the threat’s joints into a position at the end of their range of motion and apply force in that direction using a position which gives you leverage. You need both for it to work. During exercise the principles are exactly the opposite; you want to avoid positioning your joints at the end of their range of motion if the weight and leverage results in excessive stretching or compression of joint tissues in that position, and removing either of those two – extreme stretch or excessive force –  significantly reduces your risk of injury.

A good example of this is the dumbbell pullover. When your upper arms are moving in the sagittal plane parallel to each other your shoulders can only flex so far before ligaments in the shoulder restrict further movement.  This can be tested by standing with your back flat against a wall and slowly raising your arms in front of you while keeping your elbows shoulder-width apart. During the dumbbell pullover, as you lower the weight approaching this position the horizontal distance between your shoulder and the center of gravity of your arms and the weight increases, increasing the lever and the resistance force. If you allow your shoulders to flex as far as you can using a heavy enough weight you can damage the ligaments or capsule. To avoid a shoulder injury you can do one of two things. Either only lower the weight until you just begin to feel a slight stretch in your lats and shoulders, avoiding an extreme stretch, or perform the exercise using a cable with an overhead pulley, minimizing the lever and force against your shoulders near the stretched position.

Use a weight you can perform at least a moderate number of reps with in good form

Assuming you have healthy muscles and joints you’re not likely to get hurt using heavy weights if you follow all of the above, but heavy weights are not necessary for effective training and some research even shows moderate loads can be more effective for stimulating muscular strength and size gains.

My personal preference is to start people at a weight they can perform an exercise with in good form for a time under load (TUL) of sixty to ninety seconds, and adjust from there if necessary (for more on determining the optimal rep range see High Intensity Workouts). On the low end I do not have anyone using more weight than they can use with good form for at least around thirty to forty seconds, since form tends to break down much faster with weights heavier than this.

If your form on an exercise is even a little questionable, reduce the weight enough that you can perform your upper target rep number or TUL in perfect form, and gradually increase from there. Only good reps count. Do not increase the weight on an exercise if your form with your current weight is poor.

Proper Mindset

As I mentioned earlier, exercise is about using weights to work your muscles, not about using your muscles to lift weights. This is not just a matter of semantics, it is an important difference in how you think about exercise, a difference that has a tremendous impact on how you go about it. When you think of exercise as something you do to the weights with your muscles, you will tend to move in a manner that makes it easier to accomplish the assumed objective of making the weight go up and down, which tends to make the exercise both less effective and more dangerous. When you think of exercise as a process of using weights to accomplish the real objective of exercise, which is to efficiently load the target muscles, you will tend to move in a manner which more effectively accomplishes this, and reduces your risk of injury.  I’ve already written quite a bit on mindset elsewhere, so I’m not going to repeat myself here, but I strongly recommend reading Focus On Your Muscles Not The Numbers and Intellect Versus Instinct for a more detailed discussion of this.