Group: General Fitness & Exercise

General Fitness & Exercise
Created: 2011/12/31, Members: 379, Messages: 54578

Various general exercise related discussions. Find out what it takes to reach your fitness goals through daily effective exercise. With so many options we try to find out what works best.

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Big gains w/o injury

sweitz14
sweitz14
Posts: 45
Joined: 2003/03/28
United States
2008/11/23, 11:11 AM
I'm 34 and have regularly trained since highschool. Now that age is starting to creap up on my I find that I need to be much more careful to avoid injury, particularly shoulders.

My question is, how do I balance an agressive, heavy weight program and avoid injury? I know you can't get/stay big without going heavy, but how do you go heavy consistently without getting injured? I always warm up properly and focus on good form (especially keeping form proper to avoid shoulder inpingment in my case). I even got a personal trainer for several months to help perfect my form. Wondering if I should start going heavy on fewer workouts?

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. It's very frustrating to not be able to train the way I used to.

Thanks
7707mutt
7707mutt
Posts: 7,686
Joined: 2002/06/18
United States
2008/11/23, 11:43 AM
I am 38 and know what you mean. I find training heavy for 6-8 weeks then 4-6 weeks of lighter training seems to work good.

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returnofplex
returnofplex
Posts: 801
Joined: 2007/10/26
United States
2008/11/24, 10:25 AM
I suffer from chronic shoulder pain myself, due to some less than genius training in my early lifting days. One thing that has helped me is on the pressing movements I don't do the 100% range of motion. Benching for example; I bring the bar down until my elbows are just about parallel to my body. The bar ends up about a fist worth of distance to my chest at the bottom of the movement. With Military presses, the bar comes just parallel to my mouth instead to touching my chest. So far I've been able to grow really well, and avoid further injury to my shoulder. I hope that helps.
sweitz14
sweitz14
Posts: 45
Joined: 2003/03/28
United States
2008/11/28, 03:34 PM
Thanks for your thoughts on this guys. Appreciate the tips.