Can stress increase your risk of injury during workouts?

Can stress increase your risk for workout injuries?

 

The short answer is yes.

 

I’m dealing with both a strained left shoulder and left

elbow right now.

 

Anyone who works out knows that so-called “over-use”

injuries happen from time to time.  But these strains that I am

currently recovering from both happened out of the blue.

 

Each strained happened while exercising, but with movements

that I would normally have no problem with. And each strain is

taking an unusually long time to recover from.

 

So why am I sharing this with you?

 

Because I want you to minimize the risk of injury to yourself in

your own workouts.

 

Now when I said that these strains happened out of the blue, some

people could interpret that the strains were random.  But through my

workout experience, my feeling is that two moderate strains happening near

the same time with an educated/advanced  exerciser are more than random.

 

Why would these strains happen if there were no dramatic changes

in my workout style?

 

The short answer is stress.

 

Of course, muscular stress can cause strains.

 

But this is different.

 

It’s more of a chronic stress tied in with systemic fatigue.

 

I had recently increased my work hours at Personal Fitness Advantage

from a standard sixty hours per week to seventy (this personal trainer needs

get out of our Plantation, Florida personal training studio and get some

more sun and fresh air!).  In addition, there were a few recent tragedies

within my family and social network.

 

I believe that my body was able to handle the sixty hours, but the

seventy hours per week (possibly along with the tragedies) pushed

it over the edge.

 

A take away lesson for you is that your body is at greater risk for

injury when you are dealing with increased  an workload in other areas

of life and the general fatigue to the body that that causes.

 

A study recently published in the journal Pyschological and

Cognitive Sciences entitled ‘Chronic stress, glucocorticoid

receptor resistance, inflammation, and disease risk’, by Cohen, et al.,

touches on the general pheonemenom I’m referring to.

 

“The immune system’s ability to regulate inflammation predicts

who will develop a cold, but more importantly it provides an explanation

of how stress can promote disease,” says Cohen, of Carnegie Mellon University.

 

From my understanding, the study suggests that your body’s process

of inflammation is more likely to go haywire when you are under

greater degrees of stress.  We all know that we are more likely to get

sick when dealing with high loads of stress and not getting enough rest.

This study continues to answer the question of why that is and how

inflammation in the body could lead to disease.

 

Although the study is not specific to unexplained exercise-related

injuries, I believe the same or similar processes are at work.

 

The good news is that moderate amounts of well-designed exercise

tends to promote a healthy immune system and a balanced inflammatory

response. You just need to be extra, extra careful when exericisng

while under high amounts of stress or under conditions where you

are fatigued to a large degree.

 

And for you South Florida fitness buffs, as I reminded myself, make

sure to go out and enjoy the beach and fresh air! It’s too easy to take it

for granted.