Endurance

How an Injury Can Actually Make You Better

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By Dr. Chris Leib and the Exercise Geeks

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For the past decade I have had the opportunity to work with a variety of populations experiencing a wide array of injuries. In this time, one of the most meaningful lessons I have learned is that injury, although it may have its inherent negative consequences, has great potential as a teaching tool for improved movement quality and behavioral change.

We live in a society that promotes quantity over quality and routine over mastery. This makes the average exercise enthusiast a prime candidate for overuse injury due to excessive volume of low quality movement patterns. An injury is the body’s way of telling you to stop and rethink your exercise strategies – and hopefully put increased focus towards movement quality.

In a moment, I will lay out several ways in which we can use injury as an opportunity to create safer and more effective exercise strategies. But before we get into how injury can be helpful, we first must understand common reasons why we get hurt.

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Strength Training for Peak Endurance Performance

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By Marc Lewis and the Exercise Geeks

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Let’s face it: too many coaches and trainers overlook the need for maximal strength and power development in endurance athletes. Sure, it’s easy to simply cast aside the endurance athletes and focus on the high-octane sports like football, basketball, and baseball. After all, specificity dictates that they only need muscular endurance training, right? No doubt, there’s a time and place for high-rep work. But it turns out that well-trained and elite endurance athletes are often just spinning their wheels with too much of it.

Ultimately, the goals of any good strength training program are to optimize performance while reducing injury. Nevertheless, there remain many misconceptions regarding not only the type of strength training that endurance athletes need, but also the adaptations they need to make.

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