Injuries are a natural part of life in general, and, as anyone who has been training seriously for some time can attest to, of training.
No matter if your poison is running, biking, or strength training, injuries tend to sneak up every now and then, although the majority of them are hopefully mild and quick in passing.
Still, you should learn how to prevent and manage your average training injuries. In this article, I’ll make the case that a workout log app, such as our app StrengthLog, can be a valuable tool for both preventing injuries and recovering from them faster.
Wait, What Is a Workout Log App?
A workout log app is like a digital workout journal. You write down what you did in your workouts: the exercises, weights, sets, and reps.
The purpose of doing this is that the next time you train a similar workout, you look at what weights you used and how many sets and reps you did last time and try to lift a little more today. This is the key to prolonged strength training results and the most important principle of strength training in general.
In the case of StrengthLog, our workout log app also has hundreds of strength training programs for various goals and fitness levels, as well as a list of exercise demonstrations.
How A Workout Log App Can Help in Injury Prevention
So, how can a workout log app help prevent injuries?
In three main ways.
1. By Tracking Training Volume
Rapid increases in training volume or load is one of the biggest sources of injuries in almost every sport and exercise modality, strength training included.
A workout log app helps you track how much you have previously been training. This guides you in increasing your training volume just enough to make gains, but not so much that your muscles, joints, or tendons get irritated and start complaining.
You can either use the app’s statistics for this or simply copy (or just look at) your previous workouts and increase the volume or load by a small amount each workout.
2. Balanced Training Programs for Every Fitness Level
Unsure of how much training is adequate for your current fitness level and goals? StrengthLog has over a hundred strength training programs and workouts written by personal trainers, powerlifting coaches, and bodybuilding experts.
Simply choose a training program suited to your current situation and skip the guesswork. You should, however, always be prepared to adjust a training program to your particular circumstances if necessary.
You might have greater or lower volume capacity, you might need to switch some exercises for various reasons, and so on. Following the program in principle is almost always more important than the details.
3. Learn Proper Form
Unsure of how to perform an exercise properly? Our workout log has an exercise list of over 300 exercises, complete with step-by-step instructions, video demonstrations, and muscles worked in the exercise.
Look up the instructions before performing a new exercise, and start practicing proper form from the get-go.
How A Workout Log App Can Help in Injury Recovery
Sometimes, an injury happens despite your best efforts. How do you deal with one once it’s happened?
The main thing to grasp is that for a lot of training-related injuries, complete rest is seldom the solution.
It might be initially, for a few days or so, but then you require movement to heal and recover.
As physiotherapist Greg Lehman famously said:
Treatment in crude nutshell, “calm shit down, build shit up”
You need to decrease the load until you find a pain-free threshold to perform a given movement. From there, you gradually and systematically increase the load very slowly.
This gives your tissues time to heal and your brain and nervous system time to build confidence in the injured body part again.
A workout log app can be immensely helpful in this progressive recovery, as you can easily see what you lifted last time and increase it slightly.
If you want to lay out a plan to follow, you can even plan workouts for weeks ahead or write yourself a custom training program.
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If You’re Not Tracking, You’re Guessing
No matter if you’re injured or not, I believe a workout log is one of the greatest tools for improving your strength training results.
StrengthLog is a free workout log app and has no ads.
Want to give it a spin?
Download it with the buttons below!
Click here to read more about our workout log app.
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