Don’t compete with yourself when exercising! Effective exercise two or three times a week is enough.
Yang Yuping
Outpatient consultation
Recently, badminton veteran Lin Dan, who has 20 world titles, announced his retirement and missed the Tokyo Olympic Games. Lin Dan wrote that physical strength and pain no longer allow him to fight side by side with his teammates. We all know that exercise is good for health, but 20 years of professional sports career has left many injuries for Lin Dan. As ordinary people, we sometimes increase our exercise in pursuit of sports achievements and ignore the warning signals sent by our bodies, which is likely to cause harm to our health. Today, we will talk to you about why ordinary people can’t compete with themselves when exercising.
[Case 1] Ms. Wang is a white-collar worker in the workplace and fell in love with playing badminton 10 years ago. However, since 2018, her right leg and knee have always had a dull pain. During this period, she received several treatments intermittently, and the symptoms were relieved after treatment. However, Ms. Wang loves playing badminton very much, and if she doesn’t play badminton for a week, she will feel uncomfortable all over. Therefore, she still keeps playing badminton twice a week during the treatment period, and her symptoms will be repeated after playing badminton. Recently, Ms. Wang participated in a parent badminton competition organized by her daughter’s school. The competition lasted for two consecutive days, and Ms. Wang finally won the singles champion and the doubles runner-up. However, after the game, she felt the symptoms aggravated, and her right knee ached when she went down the stairs. She went to the hospital to take an X-ray and found meniscus injury.
[Case 2] Mr. Zhang is 1.8 meters tall and weighs 192 Jin. He started running to lose weight in May 2015. Initially 5 to 8 kilometers a day, 4 times a week, the weight loss effect is obvious. After half a year, he joined a running group. Seeing the rapid progress of the runners in the group, Mr. Zhang also started to train extra, running 12 kilometers a day, four times a week. Three months later, he began to feel pain under the heel of his left foot. He went to the hospital for an injection to stop the pain and continued to run. In April and May of 2016, he participated in two half-horse races, and his right heel hurt after each run. He insisted on training while applying medicine, and closed it twice in half a year. At the end of that year, he also participated in the men’s 800-meter race in the unit sports meeting and won the first place after running painfully. When he reached the finish line, his right foot suddenly couldn’t walk, and he was sent to the emergency department of the hospital by his colleagues. After medical imaging diagnosis, Mr. Zhang’s right achilles tendon was partially broken.
Rest when it is time to rest.
After reading the above cases, we can easily find that the main cause of physical injury of the two patients is long-term overload exercise. They have been overworked for a long time, resulting in chronic inflammation of tendons and surrounding soft tissues. Because I didn’t rest and adjust in time, I continued to exercise excessively, which aggravated the inflammatory condition. It is unrealistic for athletes to rest for a long time because of their performance requirements. But for ordinary people, there is plenty of time to rest and adjust, and ordinary injuries can basically heal themselves. If you continue to exercise a lot if you are injured, it will eventually make the injury difficult to repair.
In addition, the competitive mentality in sports is often an important cause of sports injuries. Being competitive, pursuing excitement, and like to challenge the limits should be tried under the protection of very good physical function and state. For the general fitness crowd whose purpose is to exercise, it is still necessary to relax and straighten their mentality and exercise according to their own physical adaptability.
We are all ordinary people, not athletes. The biggest difference between professional athletes and us is that sports are their career. For high-intensity training and competitions, they have no choice, because only in this way can they achieve good results and get the opportunity to win honor for their country and realize their ideals. We ordinary people are different. We all have our own jobs. Exercise is just a form of entertainment or a part of our lifestyle. When we get tired during exercise, we should take a quick rest.
Effective exercise two or three times a week is enough.
Most people take part in physical exercise after work. If you exercise too little or even don’t exercise, your health may decline, while if you exercise too much, you may lack energy, be tired and sleepy at work, and reduce your work efficiency. Therefore, knowing your body and controlling the amount of exercise reasonably are the keys to prevent chronic sports injuries. Knowing yourself and estimating the amount of exercise you can bear is what everyone should do before starting exercise.
So how to control the amount of exercise? Specifically, how long is it better to exercise every few days? According to the accumulation of human exercise ability and the principle of fatigue elimination, it is generally suggested that it is more appropriate to carry out effective exercise with moderate intensity every 2 to 3 days. In other words, two or three effective exercises a week are enough.
What is effective exercise? Athletes usually measure their heart rate after exercise, but for ordinary people, it is not possible to accurately measure their heart rate every time they exercise. So we can take fatigue as a better indicator. If we don’t reach a certain degree of fatigue, our sports system can’t get real exercise. But if you are too tired, it is easy to cause sports injuries. So we should learn to find the fatigue point of the body, and the exercise that reaches the fatigue point is effective exercise.
If you have dry mouth, rapid heartbeat, dizziness and smoking in your throat during exercise, your body is actually reminding you that it is time to drink some water and have a rest. If you feel better after 5 to 10 minutes’ rest, it means that you have just reached the point of fatigue. This is a relatively simple way to judge.
Close the needle according to the doctor’s advice.
Many people have the same problem of overweight as Mr. Zhang. When jumping and running, their weight has a great impact on their knees and feet. Therefore, everyone should always pay attention to their own weight and choose exercise that suits their weight. For example, people who are overweight should try to choose sports with less joint load, such as swimming, cycling and elliptical instrument.
In addition, Mr. Zhang made an inappropriate choice in treatment, that is, he blocked it more than once. Many people have heard of the therapy of blocking needles. The principle of blocking needle is to hit the hormone to the local tendon tissue, which has the functions of diminishing inflammation, relieving pain and relieving spasm, but it may also cause tissue damage or even necrosis. Therefore, it is necessary for a sports medicine doctor with rich clinical experience to help the patient decide whether or not to close the wound and when to close it. Therefore, it is best for patients not to listen to the doctor’s dissuasion and insist on asking the doctor to give closed treatment to reduce the chance of being hurt by the side effects of hormones.
Thus, in order to avoid sports injuries, we should learn some scientific fitness methods and knowledge. For example, the correct posture of playing and running, but also to understand some related sports medicine knowledge, in order to choose the right treatment at the first time.
Finally, I want to remind you that warm-up before exercise can not only reduce the probability of injury, but also quickly activate muscles and joints. The increasing frequency of exercise during the warm-up process will also make our cardiopulmonary function slowly adapt to the load generated by the upcoming exercise. Therefore, I hope everyone will pay attention to the warm-up session and do a good job of warming up before exercise. (Author: Deputy Chief Physician, Institute of Sports Medicine, Third Hospital of Beijing Medical University)