Bodybuilders are a persistent bunch… almost as bad as runners! And they tend to check out the “HERD” doing whatever exercises and routines the “pros” are doing…
Now, if your goal is usually to be as big as possible and you’re generally not very concerned along with your health and fitness, don’t even bother this article… this informative article is for bodybuilders who ARE worried about their health and want to be big, strong, powerful, and agile… if that’s you, read on…
The reason why so many bodybuilders have problems with a wide variety of injuries is because there are several things the “pros” don’t tell you…
To start, the articles that you see in most of the muscle mags aren’t even compiled by the “pros”… and the exercise routines they recommend are always extreme and often not even utilized by the “pro” who supposedly wrote because their primary goal is to offer magazines… not provide you with the real deal on bodybuilding.
If you should be seriously interested in bodybuilding and want to accomplish your true peak, you’ll need to keep injury free… and that’s just about impossible if you train they way most bodybuilders do.
There are many key strategies that you need to use at this time not to only eliminate any aches, pains and injuries you already have, but additionally keep from creating more muscle imbalances in the future. For a more detailed way to understand muscle imbalances, get in touch with a Coquitlam Personal Trainer to get proper guidelines and workout plans.
Strategy #1 – Target the Weaklings!
No, we don’t mean the exercises you believe your weak at, or even the muscles you believe are underdeveloped… what we mean could be the muscles that are weak with regards to the opposing muscle group.
For instance, in the initial article we mentioned why the Leg Extension is not really a great exercise and why it’s responsible for so many cases of knee, hip, and back pain… and this is because, most people, especially bodybuilders, are actually over developed and stronger in the quadriceps… and usually have an important imbalance between the quadriceps and hamstrings.
Another reason bodybuilders tend to produce so many severe muscle imbalances is because they emphasize the front of your body more compared to back… a great exemplory instance of it’s this that we call “The T-shirt Muscle Workout” and it always includes dozens of sets of chest and biceps…
do you know what we mean… in just one single workout you do flat bench, incline, decline, pec deck, dumbbell fly, cable cross overs… and then for biceps you’ve got barbell curls, dumbbell curls, preacher curls, cable curls, machine curls, and the list goes on…
So in place of emphasizing the muscles that are already strong, you will want to really hit those weak and under worked muscles like: neck, upper back, shoulder rotators, hamstrings, glutes, hip rotators, lower abs, and shins.
These areas are generally weak, tight, out of balance using their opposing muscles, susceptible to muscle strains and pulls and most importantly, these imbalances lead to major injuries and conditions like back pain, knee pain, rotator cuff tears, tendonitis and others.
Most of these conditions are caused by muscle imbalances and will NOT disappear if you work towards correcting the imbalances… and the only method to learn for certain which imbalances are causing your pain or injury is to accomplish some physical assessments with the help of a Coquitlam Personal Trainer.