Injury Prevention Requires a Mental Shift in Gym Goers

by Michael Hughes

It has been a growing concern of mine, as a gym owner and coach, that rehabilitation and restoration is undervalued by the average American gym goer. In San Luis Obispo most of our gym goers are white collar workers, inactive most hours in the day, who come into the gym, expecting a high level of performance out of their inactive body. Likely they come with a mentality to make up for the hours sitting at a desk by giving the workout all they can give and to pick up heavier weight, go faster and push harder to reverse the effects of their inactive lifestyle.

Is this how the body truly was designed to work?

No. In fact this mindset actually threatens your ability to move sustainably. What is more often the case is that your desire for a better body will be replaced by a body of brokenness and pain. This is not a question of "if", its a question of "when".

From the vantage point of a coach, here is what we see happening in our industry and sometimes in our own facility:

• With anything you've worked hard to build, there can be an undeniable pride and identity involved in reaching a high performance level in fitness. Gym goers have had to work hard and be dedicated to get to a certain level of performance. They expect their body will always perform at that level and that they need to push to maintain it.
• There is an undervaluing of rehabilitation and restoration. The only times we see this being valued is if an athlete truly is injured. But then restoration is not a journey, it's more often seen as a means to an end. It's not likely to be considered a lifestyle pursuit, but rather something to "get through" to get on with life. 
• There is a disconnect between the importance of daily diet, sleeping patterns, hydration and stress levels have on the levels of performance in the gym. 
• We observe higher performance athletes "pushing through the pain" and mentally trying to overcome physical breakdowns. It's as if they are hearing their old high school coaches yelling over them to keep going, that to be truly tough they have to push through. We see athletes ignoring injury, almost proud of the fact that they can keep going. But we rarely observe these athletes picking up less weight or reducing their expectations for their workout. They keep going until they hear a doctor tell them to stop working out or risk being hurt long term.

These trends are incredibly dangerous to fitness programs and facilities looking to provide sustainable workouts built for frequency, consistency and true vitality. This is something at Gymnazo we spend a great deal of time as coaches identifying and strategizing to overcome.

What needs to change?

Workout Programs Built for Restoration

If your goal is to be healthy and fit for many years, then your workouts need to be built with consistent restoration and your mental attitude may need to shift. If your mindset is all about performance, but your daily lifestyle doesn't breed performance, your body will be better served with consistency than intensity. Very few of our members actually need constant performance every day of their life.

At Gymnazo we are committed on the service end of our programming to build in restoration through intentional warm ups, cool downs and through offering three different programs scaling in intensity. The small group programs we have built are designed for athletes to move up and down as their body needs them to. For example, after going on vacation, we intend athletes to start at G1 and move up as their body adapts to more focused physical demands. We intend athletes who have identified some pain or discomfort to reduce the demands of their body and go down in levels to help their body heal.

While certainly we respect doctor's wishes for some athletes to step out of working out altogether, typically this is only after the athlete has ignored their movement disfunction and tried to power through workouts, making the disfunction more serious, and requiring a longer term break in working out.

It doesn't have to be this way. But it takes a respect for the body's changing abilities, listening to their body each day as it moves and humility to adjust workout expectations.

The Mindset of the Athlete

We always say a good coach should be able to see movement dysfunction, but is impossible to identify each one and always catch it. Athletes are much more in tune with their body because their nerves send pain to alert the brain to stop and take notice of what is going wrong. Coaches will never be able to tap into that. We can only see the external signs of this.

So what needs to change is athletes vocalizing when they feel a twinge or weird tweak in their body before it becomes an injury. Don't ignore your body. Nerves exist to send alerts to problems. Ignoring them won't solve it. By telling a coach what is going on, the athletes give the coach(es) a chance to respond and partner with them.

A coach should be there to help their athletes get what they need from their workout, whatever that means. But each athlete has to use the coach to help them. It's up to the athlete (you) to utilize the intelligence and strategies that each coach is able to pull from.

Final Thoughts

Our passion is to make each of our of athletes successful not just for 3-6 months but for decades. We see the big picture and want each one of our members to maintain a level of health and fitness that enables them to function well as they age and hit new stages of life. We thrive on helping people eliminate pain, heal injuries and are happy to tailor workouts to make this happen. Our responsibility is to be prepared for what each member's movement disfunctions are. It's the athletes' (your) responsibility to set the right expectations, to constantly reevaluate where the body is and to let us know how to help. Together we can accomplish much!

Sweat It Out- Beating Stress through Exercise

By Kaleena Andruss, Gymnazo Coach

A recent survey of 2,500 adults by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health found that 49% of people had a major stressful event occur within the year. Majority of stresses came from their financial situation, work problems, too many responsibilities overall, and poor health. While there is such a thing as healthy stress, how does negative stress affect your overall health? There are long lists of physical, emotional, and behavioral symptoms or problems that can arise from stress including but not limited to: depression, anxiety, irritability, low self-esteem, frequent illness, headaches, low energy, loss or gain of appetite, increase in drug or alcohol consumption, and acne.

NPR’s study also found that the top responses to stress where less sleep, eating less (loss of appetite), and exercising or playing sports less. Now, let’s focus on these things for a minute: less sleep, less exercise, and poor dietary changes? These three are a recipe for disaster! It’s easy to eat poorly when you’re stressed and tired because you don’t have any energy to cook, it’s hard to find the motivation to exercise when you’re feeling lethargic, and it’s extremely difficult to catch up on sleep when you can’t fall asleep. It’s a vicious cycle that we wrestle with day in and day out. However, we can beat the cycle and win this daily battle!


In my opinion, the best way to combat stress is by sweating it out: exercising. Exercising causes our brains to produce hormones called endorphins. Endorphins are like magical jellybeans, not a scientific term, that can reduce our perception of pain (stress) and make us feel happy. They can even give us a sense of euphoria. This feeling of happiness starts a chain reaction that makes us feel motivated and alert. We’re also more inclined to eat healthier after working out, seeing as we don’t want to feel all that sweat went to waste. The physical demands you place on your body during you workout cause you to fatigue and relax your muscle. This fatigue isn’t just physical; it’s mental as well. So, now when you go to bed, your body and mind are so tired that you actually FALL ASLEEP. By simply exercising, we’ve just knocked out some major factors contributing to stress and increasing our overall health!

At Gymnazo, coaches and staff strive to create a friendly, positive, and motivational environment so that you can enjoy yourself during your workout. We are here to serve you! We hope to provide you with the inspiration and motivation to get through your workout, so that when you leave the gym drenched in sweat you feel a sense of pride and accomplishment that makes all of life’s stresses seem a little less stressful. Let’s do away with the phrase “Don’t sweat it” and replace it with, “Definitely sweat it: Sweat it out.”

Additional Research:

• Huffington Post, Study: 8 out of 10 American Are Stressed, by Madison Park

• NPR, Stressed Out: Americans Tell Us About Stress in Their Lives, by Scott Hensley and Alyson Hurt

Conventional Training in an Unconventional World: Why 3D Training in Sports Matter

JAVIER SORIANO/AFP/Getty Image

By Kaleena Andruss, Coaching Intern


With all these World Cup games going on, it’s easy to see why soccer players are some of the world’s most elite athletes. They walk, run, sprint, and jump forwards, backwards, upwards, and laterally. It’s 90 minutes of extreme physical demands-which explains those fantastic physiques! As a local soccer coach, I know first hand that we coaches tend to focus on the tactics of how to win the game versus how we move as humans within the game. It is now becoming increasingly important, especially within youth sports, to develop fundamentally sound movement patterns to not only develop agility and coordination, but to prevent injury.

From experience, I believe that 3 dimensional training, training within all 3 planes of motion, can be far more superior to conventional training. More often than not, we are contorting our bodies at rapid speeds to adjust to the play of the game. Players do not simply run up and down the field in straight lines! Conventional training methods have athletes training mostly in the sagittal plane (movements forward and backward), but tend to neglect movement laterally and transversely (rotating with our hips, trunk, or spine).

A simple pivot to turn and run another direction requires us to rotate and bound at an angle behind us before we straighten out into a proper sprint, but that’s not something conventional training works on. Every year, approximately 150,000 people suffer from an ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) knee injury. Female basketball and soccer players are 2-8 times more likely to suffer from an ACL injury than any other sport, and 70% of those injuries are non-contact.

I’ve watched teammates and players tear their ACL’s when simply landing after jumping or trying to turn and change direction. Conventional injury prevention training has girls and women performing barbell squats or lunges to strengthen the muscle around the knee, but nothing that trains us to decelerate, or land, with excellent stability on one leg after turning or jumping or both simultaneously.

3D training and conditioning changes all of that. For example: explosive lunge forward, explosive lunge laterally, and explosive lunge at posterior (behind you) 135 degree angles. Not only does this target all the muscles of our lower body, but it’s functional and relevant to the sport. Planting to strike a ball: explosive leap forward, defending or getting in the way of shot: explosive leap laterally, pivoting at a sprint or reaching for an errant pass: explosive lunge at an angle.

The body does not remain in a fixed position, and even when we walk we set off a chain reaction between our foot, ankles, calves, quadriceps, hamstrings, and glutes. So training to enhance the effectiveness of this kinetic chain- these linked muscles- is critical to success in athletics (2). We ask our muscles to function in all directions and planes, so why train in only one or two? In order to excellently preform in all planes of motion, we must train in all planes of motion.

Kaleena Andruss is a local Soccer Coach for young women. She is currently coaches for San Luis Obispo High School Girls Varsity Soccer and Central Coast Girls U14 Eagle Soccer Club. She is interning at Gymnazo for the summer of 2014.