Understanding how your body adapts to exercise can help prevent injuries

A common question from athletes is ”how can I avoid injuries?”  Obviously, injuries happen, and some are just bad luck.  But a common cause of injuries is that people do too much too soon.  Often, they feel like their training program is “too easy” or is progressing “too slowly”.  They add in extra workouts because they feel strong.  Why is this such a common feeling and why do coaches preach patience and to follow the plan?  It has to do with how the body adapts to exercise.  When we exercise, we create all kinds of responses and adaptations in our bodies.  

First, we rapidly improve our cardiovascular fitness.  Our heart starts moving more oxygen to our working muscles and we can start to exercise longer and with more intensity.  Blood vessels grow to bring more fuel and oxygen to the muscles.  We feel more fit and can run or bike for longer periods of time without getting tired.

Second, our muscles get stronger.  The molecular machinery that creates force multiplies and gets more efficient.  We can generate more power with the same amount of effort.  That short hill that used to feel impossible is suddenly doable.  

Third, our joints and tendons adapt to the new movement.  We move more fluidly and with a greater range of motion.  Our joints can keep up with the greater power in our muscles and the extra time our new cardiovascular fitness allows us to exercise.

Last, the connection between our brain and muscles slowly improves and we get more efficient in our movements.  This allows us to use less energy for the same movement and we continue to get faster and faster.

These are amazing adaptations, but they take time.  And more importantly each of these adaptations don’t happen at the same rate.  Our cardiovascular system adapts relatively quickly compared to our muscles and joints.  That’s one of the reasons why overuse injuries are so common.  We feel more fit, but we aren’t quite adapted yet to the increased load.  It can take months to fully adapt.  And in the meantime our fitness continues to increase and our muscles and joints are playing catch-up.

So how can we ever avoid injuries?  The answer is to be patient.  If you increase your training volume slowly, you will adapt as you go and you can lessen the risk of an overuse injury.  A good coach will work with you to create a plan that will give you just enough challenge to continue to improve your fitness while reducing the risk of injury.   It can sometimes take a large amount of patience to be an endurance athlete.  Most people have years of potential improvements in them, but the key is to slowly build that fitness day over day and week over week.  It takes time, but one day you’ll look back and realize how incredibly far you’ve come.