Whether it’s running, strength training, football, tennis, golf, martial arts or simply staying active at the weekend, injury can be frustrating.
It can also change the way you think about the activities you enjoy.
After an injury, it’s common to start asking questions such as:
Should I stop running?
Are deadlifts bad for my back?
Should I avoid playing tennis twice a week?
Am I simply getting too old to do this?
Being sensible after an injury is important. There are times when an activity needs to be temporarily modified, reduced or stopped to allow recovery.
But avoiding activity indefinitely isn’t necessarily the answer.
Injury prevention shouldn’t be about trying to remove every possible physical stress from your life. A more useful approach is often to ask:
How can I better prepare my body for the activities I want it to perform?
That shifts the conversation away from fear and avoidance and towards preparation, progressive loading, recovery and physical capacity.
Can Injuries Actually Be Prevented?
Perhaps the first thing to clarify is that no exercise programme, warm-up or physiotherapy treatment can guarantee that you’ll never become injured.
Injury is complex.
Training load, previous injury, physical conditioning, fatigue, sleep, recovery, age, the demands of your sport and sometimes simple bad luck can all play a role.
So rather than promising to prevent injury, it is more accurate to talk about reducing injury risk.
That distinction matters.
The aim isn’t to create an indestructible body.
It’s to develop a body that is better prepared for the demands you regularly place upon it.
Activity Isn’t the Enemy
When an injury occurs during a particular activity, it’s understandable to blame the activity itself.
A runner develops knee pain and concludes that running is damaging their knees.
Someone experiences back pain during a deadlift and decides deadlifting is bad for their back.
A tennis player develops elbow pain and assumes they need to stop playing tennis.
Sometimes temporarily reducing an aggravating activity is entirely appropriate.
But there is an important difference between:
“This activity currently exceeds what I can comfortably tolerate.”
and:
“This activity is bad for my body.”
The first gives us something we can work with.
Your current tolerance can potentially be changed.
The question then becomes how we progressively prepare your body so that the activity becomes manageable again.
Think About Capacity and Demand
One of the simplest ways I explain injury risk is through the relationship between physical capacity and physical demand.
Every activity places a demand on your body.
Running requires your muscles, tendons, joints and cardiovascular system to repeatedly tolerate force.
Strength training requires you to produce and control force under load.
Tennis involves acceleration, deceleration, rotation and repeated upper-limb loading.
Football requires running, sprinting, cutting, jumping and contact.
Your body develops a certain capacity to tolerate those demands.
Problems may arise when the demands placed upon you exceed what you’re currently prepared for.
That doesn’t necessarily mean the activity itself is dangerous.
It may simply mean that the gap between what you’re asking your body to do and what it’s currently prepared to do has become too large.
The Weekend Warrior Problem
This can be particularly relevant for people with busy, desk-based working lives.
You might spend Monday to Friday sitting for much of the day, with relatively little physical activity.
Then Saturday arrives.
Suddenly you’re playing 90 minutes of football, running 10 kilometres, lifting heavy weights or spending several hours on the golf course.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of those activities.
The challenge is the contrast between the physical demands of the working week and those of the weekend.
Rather than necessarily doing less at the weekend, a better long-term strategy may be to introduce more appropriate physical loading throughout the week.
That could mean walking more, completing two short strength sessions, doing some mobility work or gradually building exposure to the movements your weekend activity requires.
The goal is to reduce the gap between your everyday physical capacity and your highest-demand activities.
Sudden Changes Matter
Our bodies are remarkably adaptable, but adaptation takes time.
Imagine someone who normally runs 5 kilometres twice per week.
They decide to train for a half marathon and suddenly increase their mileage substantially.
Or someone returns to the gym after six weeks away and immediately attempts the same weights and volume they were lifting before their break.
Or a tennis player who normally plays once per week suddenly spends a week on holiday playing every day.
The activities haven’t suddenly become harmful.
The dose has changed.
Training-load research supports paying attention to changes in the volume and intensity of physical demands, while also recognising that there is no single formula that can perfectly predict whether someone will become injured.
A sensible principle is therefore:
Build gradually enough to give your body time to adapt.
Strength Training Can Be Part of Injury Prevention
Strength training is sometimes treated as something separate from rehabilitation or injury prevention.
In reality, it can be an important part of both.
Appropriate resistance training can increase the ability of muscles and other tissues to tolerate force and can prepare you for the demands of sport and everyday life.
Research in sporting populations has found strength-based injury-prevention programmes can reduce both acute and overuse injuries, although the programme still needs to be appropriate for the individual and their activity.
This doesn’t mean everyone needs to become a powerlifter.
Your strength training should reflect what you need your body to do.
For a runner, that might involve strengthening the calves, quadriceps, hamstrings and hips.
For a tennis player, it could include lower-body strength, rotational control, shoulder capacity and progressive loading of the forearm.
For someone who simply wants to remain capable as they get older, squatting, hinging, pushing, pulling, carrying and balancing may all be useful.
Strength is not the goal for everyone. Capacity is.
Strength is simply one of the tools we can use to build it.
Do You Need “Injury-Prevention Exercises”?
Social media is full of exercises labelled:
“3 exercises to prevent knee injuries.”
“Do this before running to prevent back pain.”
“The best exercise to stop shoulder injuries.”
Unfortunately, the body isn’t quite that simple.
There is rarely one magical corrective exercise that prevents an injury.
A better programme considers:
- What activity you want to perform.
- What that activity demands from your body.
- Your current strength and conditioning.
- Previous injuries and current symptoms.
- Areas where your capacity may need developing.
- How frequently and intensely you’re training.
- How you’re recovering between sessions.
The exercises then become part of a bigger strategy rather than a collection of isolated movements.
Don’t Ignore Recovery
More exercise isn’t always the answer.
Training provides the stimulus.
Recovery gives your body the opportunity to adapt to it.
Sleep, nutrition, psychological stress, work demands and the amount of training you’re already completing can all influence recovery.
This is particularly relevant when life becomes busy.
Perhaps your training programme hasn’t changed at all, but you’re suddenly:
- Sleeping five hours instead of seven.
- Working longer days.
- Travelling frequently.
- Under significant stress.
- Training on consecutive days because that’s the only time available.
The same workout may now represent a different overall demand.
Research into athlete load increasingly considers not only training itself but the wider physiological and psychological demands placed upon the individual.
You don’t need to optimise every aspect of your life.
But if you’re repeatedly struggling with fatigue, soreness or injury, recovery deserves a place in the conversation.
What About Mobility and Flexibility?
Mobility can be useful, particularly when an activity requires movement that you currently struggle to access comfortably.
But more flexibility isn’t automatically better.
A golfer needs enough rotation to swing effectively.
A martial artist may need considerably more hip mobility.
A runner may not need either of those things.
Rather than pursuing flexibility for its own sake, I prefer to ask:
Do you have the movement options required for the activity you want to perform?
And importantly:
Can you control and tolerate those positions?
That brings mobility, strength and movement together rather than treating them as completely separate qualities.
Warm-Ups Help But They Aren’t Armour
A good warm-up can prepare you physically and mentally for the activity ahead.
Depending on the activity, it might include:
- Gradually increasing your heart rate.
- Moving through relevant ranges of motion.
- Rehearsing the movements you’re about to perform.
- Progressively exposing the body to greater speed or load.
What a warm-up cannot do is compensate for inadequate preparation over the previous weeks and months.
Ten minutes of mobility before a football match won’t suddenly prepare someone for repeated sprinting if they haven’t sprinted for six months.
Likewise, a perfect warm-up won’t necessarily compensate for a sudden doubling of training volume.
Preparation happens over weeks and months, not just in the ten minutes before exercise.
Previous Injury Matters But It Doesn’t Have to Define You
A previous injury can influence future injury risk.
But that doesn’t mean you should spend the rest of your life protecting the area.
One of the reasons structured rehabilitation matters is that pain can improve before all the physical qualities needed for your activity have been restored.
You might be able to walk without pain before you’re ready to run.
Run before you’re ready to sprint.
Squat before you’re ready to lift heavily.
Hit a tennis ball before you’re ready to play a three-set match.
Return to sport is therefore better viewed as a process rather than a single moment at the end of rehabilitation.
The aim is to progressively rebuild the qualities your activity requires and then expose you to those demands in a controlled way.
You Don’t Necessarily Need to Stop
One of the most useful questions during rehabilitation can be:
“What can I still do?”
If running currently aggravates your symptoms, perhaps you can temporarily reduce the distance rather than stop completely.
If heavy squatting is painful, perhaps you can modify the load, range, tempo or exercise variation.
If playing tennis three times per week is too much, perhaps once per week alongside rehabilitation is manageable.
This isn’t appropriate for every injury, and some conditions genuinely require a period of protection or restriction.
But where clinically appropriate, maintaining some exposure to activity can help preserve fitness, strength, confidence and enjoyment.
For low-back pain specifically, NICE recommends encouraging people to continue normal activities where possible and considers exercise as part of management.
Rehabilitation doesn’t always mean taking you away from the activity you love.
Sometimes it means finding the right dose while we build you back towards it.
A Practical Framework for Reducing Injury Risk
Rather than searching for the perfect injury-prevention exercise, consider these six questions:
1. What am I preparing for?
Running a marathon requires different physical qualities from playing golf or lifting weights.
2. What does that activity demand?
Think about strength, endurance, mobility, speed, coordination and how frequently those qualities are required.
3. Am I currently prepared for those demands?
Your previous training history matters.
4. Have I changed something recently?
Look at training volume, intensity, frequency, equipment, surfaces, competition or time away from activity.
5. Am I recovering adequately?
Consider sleep, work, stress and the rest of your weekly training.
6. Can I build my capacity progressively?
Rather than simply avoiding the difficult activity, gradually prepare yourself for it.
That is a much more useful injury-prevention strategy than trying to remove every potentially risky movement from your life.
Where Does Physiotherapy Fit In?
Physiotherapy isn’t only about treating someone once they’re injured.
Assessment can also help identify the physical demands of the activities you want to perform and where there may be opportunities to improve your preparation.
At Personal-Physio, this may involve looking at:
- Movement and mobility.
- Strength.
- Balance and control.
- Training history.
- Previous injuries.
- Current training load.
- The specific demands of your sport or activity.
From there, rehabilitation and strength & conditioning can be used to progressively develop the physical qualities that matter to you.
That might mean returning to running after knee pain.
Building confidence under a barbell after a back injury.
Preparing your shoulder and elbow for tennis.
Or simply developing enough strength and fitness to remain active and capable in everyday life.
The objective isn’t to tell you to stop doing the things you enjoy.
It’s to help prepare you to keep doing them.
Final Thoughts
There will always be some risk associated with being physically active.
But avoiding physical activity carries risks of its own.
Regular physical activity and strength training provide substantial benefits to physical and mental health, and international guidelines encourage adults to remain active and progressively build activity according to their capabilities.
So perhaps the goal shouldn’t be:
“How do I make sure I never get injured?”
A more useful question might be:
“How can I prepare my body for the things I want it to do?”
That might involve improving strength.
Building fitness.
Developing movement options.
Managing training more progressively.
Recovering better.
Or completing rehabilitation properly after an injury rather than stopping as soon as the pain disappears.
You don’t need to stop doing the activities you love simply because they place demands on your body.
The aim is to build the capacity to meet those demands.
Move Better. Get Stronger. Stay Capable.
References
Lauersen, J.B., Andersen, T.E. and Andersen, L.B. (2018) ‘Strength training as superior, dose-dependent and safe prevention of acute and overuse sports injuries: a systematic review, qualitative analysis and meta-analysis’, British Journal of Sports Medicine, 52(24), pp. 1557–1563.
National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) (2020) Low back pain and sciatica in over 16s: assessment and management (NG59). London: NICE.
Schwellnus, M. et al. (2016) ‘How much is too much? (Part 2) International Olympic Committee consensus statement on load in sport and risk of illness’, British Journal of Sports Medicine, 50(17), pp. 1043–1052.
World Health Organization (2020) WHO Guidelines on Physical Activity and Sedentary Behaviour. Geneva: World Health Organization.
