While we aren’t doctors, we feel like our #1 job is to keep all our senior fitness clients safe. Exercise can be dangerous, which is why hiring a competent coach is a good idea. With proper coaching, you can prevent injuries from doing an exercise wrong. In that vein, I’m going to share a tip we often use.
You may have guessed by now that I’m a big fan of using analogies in our personal training to help cue and get a point across. Many of them are stupid and/or corny but I find they work. Today’s fitness coaching tip will help you so you can get more out of your workouts and stay safe.
Problem
- Beginning a lift without adequate tension is a recipe for disaster and injury.
- Too often exercisers will relax at the top of a lift, and relax or almost drop the weight down. This is another injury waiting to happen.
Lights on or off?
Many times we mistakenly think of phases of an exercise/lift as a regular light switch-on or off. For example, you lift/contract and the lift switch turns on. You lower the weight by turning off the switch. This can be a recipe for injury, let alone disaster. Creating tension through your body is it’s way of creating stability and strength and protecting your body (joints, connective tissues, etc.). If you try to pick up something heavy from a ‘lights turned off’ position, you’re going to get hurt.
While you may say to yourselves that you’d never do that you may be in the other camp-the relaxing during lowering camp. Have you ever relaxed at the top of a lift and loosened everything going down or at the end of a lift before the next rep? Recently I’ve noticed this ‘turning off’ phenomenon happens frequently when dealing with the bigger lifts or when you start getting tired. However, the most common time this happens is when someone is new to lifting weights.
Be a Dimmer Switch
The solution is the dimmer switch cue/analogy. At the start of an exercise/lift your muscles are turned on/activated-albeit in a dimmed state. As the exercise gets harder you brighten the lights, or increase the tension/contraction. I’ve found that this makes a fixes the problems of not ‘feeling an exercise’, feeling it a lift in a bad way, or not feeling it in the right place (i.e. feeling a squat in your pecs not legs).
This strategy also works wonders when learning to focus on a specific muscle or muscle groups-which is important so that you know if you are doing the exercise correctly. By engaging or “turning on the lights” (aka getting some tension/contraction) in the muscle before you do the lift you will bias those tissues to do more of the work-or really just tell your brain it should be doing more of the work. The end result is you will ‘feel it’ where the exercise is designed to have you feel it.
Your homework
Next time you lift, focus on dimming and brightening your muscular tension/contraction throughout the lift and let me know your results.