How to build injury prevention into your routine and make habits stick
In this blog, Coach Jon looks at making injury prevention a permanent part of our daily routine.
Firstly, what is injury prevention, and what do you need to do to keep those niggles at bay? We have written many blogs in the past outlining some great tips on how to prevent niggles from developing into injuries and how to reduce your chance of injuries. In summary, injury prevention can include:
Ensuring adequate good quality sleep
Proper fueling of sessions and recovery
Sensible warm-up and cool-down protocols before and after workouts
Mobility work
Strength and conditioning
Physiotherapy/rehabilitation exercises
Self-massage/myofascial release or deep tissue massage
Regular check-ups with a physiotherapist
Following a well-structured training plan
Listening to your body
Rest and recovery
The list goes on.
As you can see, there are a vast array of injury prevention techniques, exercises, and best practices; trying to squeeze them all into an already busy schedule can seem like a daunting task. However, making simple tweaks to your daily routine can allow you to incorporate some beneficial injury prevention activities without taking too much extra time out of your day. This article will primarily focus on strength and conditioning and how to bring more into your day easily. We won’t focus on what particular exercises you need to do to prevent injuries (we have blogs on that too). For a bespoke structured strength and conditioning plan, it’s always best to contact a qualified personal trainer.
In Coach Tim’s recent blog, he outlines the importance of strength training and how it is really worth prioritising it over any other sessions to improve performance and reduce injury risk. However, if you really don’t have enough time in your week to add in regular stand-alone strength and conditioning sessions, then incorporating small bouts of strength exercises may be the way to go. Little and often.
To seamlessly introduce extra strength and conditioning into our routine, we have to make new habits. If you haven’t read Atomic Habits by James Clear and find yourself struggling to commit to a new positive habit or cut out a bad habit, we strongly suggest you read this book. The rest of this blog will use the Atomics Habits framework to show you how easy it is to bring much more injury prevention into your routine.
To make a new habit stick, firstly, it has to meet the following criteria laid out by Atomic Habits:
It has to be obvious - otherwise, you’ll forget to do it
It has to be attractive - otherwise, you won’t feel like starting
It has to be easy - otherwise, it will seem too difficult to complete
It has to be satisfying - otherwise, you won’t feel like sticking with it.
Let’s take an example, say you want to bring more foam rolling into your daily routine. How can we make this new habit more likely to stay with you for the long term?
Make it obvious – leave your foam roller by your bed or by the television - you’ll see the foam roller before you get into bed or turn on the TV, so you’ll be less likely to forget.
Make it attractive -–read up on the benefits of daily foam rolling; it might stop you from getting injured and even make you faster!
Make it easy – Don’t put pressure on yourself to ‘foam roll every day for 30 minutes’; habits need to be achievable, start small, make the habit 5 minutes of foam rolling every day, and you’ll be much more likely to stick with it.
Make it satisfying – foam rolling alone may be satisfying for some if you enjoy the pain! Others may need more of an incentive. Match it with some form of treat, preferably a healthy one. ‘If I foam roll every day this week, I can treat myself to a meal out this weekend, for example.
According to Atomic Habit’s, studies show that if you plan where and when you perform a new habit, it increases the likelihood of a habit sticking. To utilise this fact, Atomic Habits use a process called ‘habit stacking’, where they connect behaviours and ‘stack’ a new habit on an existing habit.
Let’s continue with our foam rolling example.
‘Before I turn the lights off downstairs on my way to bed, I will foam roll for 5 minutes.’
Atomic Habits suggest stacking multiple habits on top of each other; we suggest building this up gradually, though, remember to keep it easy, keep it attractive.
For example:
‘Before I turn the lights off downstairs on my way to bed, I will foam roll for 5 minutes, put the foam roller back next to the TV and spend 1 minute stretching my calves on the stairs before going upstairs to bed’.
This is a straightforward example of a new injury prevention habit.
Before long, you will find you are completing the new habit automatically; you won’t even have to think about it. You can translate this method to any injury prevention technique you like, such as:
10 single leg squats whilst brushing my teeth
15 glute bridges before I put my running shoes on
2 minutes of hip flexor stretching before I take my running shoes off
Holding a 1-minute plank whilst waiting for the kettle to boil for my morning coffee
It is essential to be patient. Change takes time. These habits are small but important snippets of self-improvement. These few minutes of exercise may seem trivial, but they will compound to make serious improvements over time. Real fitness adaptation occurs when there is consistency over a long period of time. Doing daily bursts of strength and conditioning can often lead to better results than the inconsistent gym visit you rarely manage to fit into your hectic schedule. It may seem like nothing is happening; you may feel you are wasting your time doing these exercises, but maybe this time next year, you look back and hopefully, you can say, ‘I’ve not been injured in over a year!’
Of course, the techniques presented by Atomic Habits, such as habit stacking, aren’t just useful for strength training and injury prevention. They offer a simple way to incorporate all sorts of new, positive behaviours into your life — whether that’s taking the time to phone a friend, performing a daily meditation, or adding in that much-needed mobility work.
What positive habits can you stack together in your daily routine?
Jon has been coaching with his local triathlon club in Hertfordshire around his full-time job as an airline pilot for several years. Unfortunately, Jon lost his pilot’s licence for 11 months in 2019 due to being diagnosed with testicular cancer (read his story here). He used the time off from flying to complete his Level 2 and Level 2 BTF diploma qualifications as well as a L3 Personal Trainer qualification. With his new coaching qualifications under his belt, Jon was able to join Tri Training Harder as a coach in 2019. He has now recovered from cancer, started flying again and is training hard for the coming triathlon season.
Jon has a flexible approach to coaching and training, from his own busy lifestyle he knows how to balance training around family, friends and social commitments. Jon loves to utilise the knowledge gained on his Personal Trainer course and finds incorporating well-structured strength and conditioning sessions vital to triathlon performance.
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