How To Create Your Own Conditioning Plan & What Are The Potential Injury Risks?

For any active child, teenager, or adult interested in maintaining an active, healthy lifestyle through sports, exercise, or any other sweat-inducing activity, maintaining a high level of conditioning is always going to ensure some good results! However, how can you be sure that your body is at its top level of conditioning? And better yet, how do you even know how far you can push your body? And perhaps most importantly, how can you get your body to its top level of conditioning once you determine that? What about injury? Can I get injured trying to achieve a high level of conditioning? Or is it more likely that I’ll injure myself without a high level of conditioning?

Those are a lot of very important questions that certainly need some answers! Here is a little crash course in sports conditioning. You’ll learn just how to create your own conditioning plan, stick to it, and see it through to a real-life application. In addition, we’ll talk about some potential injury risks that you should always be aware of!

Creating Your Own Conditioning Plan

Before doing anything on your own, always be sure to check with a strength and conditioning specialist who can help to optimize your performance, while also minimizing the potential risk of suffering an injury while training. Strength and conditioning specialists are just that – specialists!

Stop by your local gym or fitness center to see if you can talk to the in-house strength and conditioning specialist. They’ll walk you through the entire process of evaluating your current fitness, strength, and endurance levels first. Then, they’ll be able to recommend you a proper course of action, or even better, design a completely personalized conditioning program totally unique to your body and your specific needs.

You may even benefit by combining your conditioning training with other various sports or exercises to improve your overall performance and put your training to the test, while still working to build it up! Cross-training allows you to put different types of stresses on your body. Similar to HIIT workouts, by disrupting your normal routine, you can actually maximize your body’s ability by mixing and matching different muscle groups through short bursts of intense energy output. This should help to provide a well-rounded workout that targets multiple muscle groups, prevents over-training, and reduces the risk of injury.

What Are The Risks?

Now, back to talking about the risk for injury when participating in a conditioning training program. The most common injury most often associated with conditioning programs are acute and overuse injuries. For instance, Acute musculoskeletal injuries like muscle strains, fractures, and dislocations typically occur during traumatic events, like falling, landing incorrectly, or applying intense pressure to a particular area of the body.

On the other hand, overuse injuries can occur when you increase the frequency, intensity, or duration of your training far too quickly for your body, effectively preventing it from going through its natural recovery process.

Although these injuries can certainly be painful and put a thorn in your plans for following your conditioning plan, some normal at-home remedies like cold compresses, rest, and elevating the injured body part can help to heal minor issues. But surgery, casts, and splints could be potential treatment options for more serious injuries.

That’s it! There’s your sports conditioning lesson for today – class dismissed!

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