Several years ago, I came across a list of 3 simple rules for exercise that I think are incredibly wise in their simplicity, but that I see violated, to the great detriment of the exerciser, on a daily basis.
I didn’t come up with the rules, but I also can’t offer an accurate attribution. I think they came from the influential Boston area strength coach Mike Boyle, but furious Googling has not confirmed that he actually said or wrote it.
In any case…here are the rules.
Rule 1: Don’t get injured exercising
Rule 2: Reduce your injury risk
Rule 3: Improve performance
Before we go on, let’s take a quick look at what I think of when I talk about exercise to improve performance and exercise to reduce injury risk so we’re all on the same page.
Improving Performance
I think of improving performance as using exercise to allow you to do more of something. That might be do lift a heavier weight, lift a weight more times, run further, run faster, jump higher, hold a position for longer, etc. It doesn’t really fit with the wording, but I also lump all of the aesthetic goals in this category. Things like drop weight, drop body fat, tone this or that body part.
Improving performance is essentially all the stuff that we like about exercise.
Reduce Injury Risk
Exercise is proven to be effective at reducing your injury risk. It even reduces injury risk related to playing in high level musicians. In some cases, the movements that you do to reduce injury risk are similar to the things that improve performance, which is nice. But inevitably you’ll have to devote some time to exercises that don’t feel like they provide an immediate benefit, which tends to make them easy to leave out of a program, especially if you feel short on time.
How to Think About the Rules
The rules are meant to be followed in order. You need to have Rule 1 covered before moving on to rule 2. You need both Rule 1 and 2 covered before moving on to rule 3.
The way I look at it, you can use these rules to classify the exercise plan you are following into one of 3 categories. Bad Plans, OK Plans, Good Plans.
Bad Plans
In my physical therapy practice, I routinely see people who are in pain because they haven’t thought about boring Rules 1 and 2. They get right into the fun stuff of building muscle, losing weight, running further/faster or lifting more.
But what if someone who was designing a training program for Olympic athletes did that. Olympic athletes need to perform at a very high level, so Rule 3 should be the focus, right?
But if Olympic athletes get hurt in the gym, not even doing their sport, but in the gym exercising (Rule 1 violation), what do you think the program manager is going to do.
Fire the strength and conditioning coach.
Or what if the scenario was a little different. What if the team starts to see a higher than expected injury rate when the athletes are participating in their sport and they take a look back at the exercise program. If they see very little time dedicated to injury prevention (Rule 2 violation), what do you think will happen.
That’s right, once again the strength and conditioning coach is getting fired.
Most of us don’t have a team (or orchestra) strength and conditioning coach. If we exercise, most of us piece together the program from things we read and suggestions from friends. If you only want the bare minimum out of your body, you may be able to get away with a bad plan. But if you are trying to do something more interesting with your body, like play music at a high level, there is a chance that a bad plan will make things worse rather than better.
OK Plans
OK Plans keep people out of trouble by avoiding high risk activities based on individual ability. They also at least try to address injury risk. But often times these plans do so at the expense of improving performance. They are overly cautious and spend too much time on “corrective exercise” and not enough time on making people work.
I think these are OK Plans because they are at least not creating injuries and getting people moving. First do no harm, as they say. I especially think that OK plans are ok for musicians. Not getting hurt and reducing your injury risk can greatly compliment your playing. But improving your capacity at any given exercise won’t necessarily translate to playing better.
Great Plans
The Good Plan has all of the elements of the OK Plan, but it gets the balance between the 3 rules right. It’s conservative enough to avoid injury, but aggressive enough to reach the performance goals. It is also smart about what performance goals are set, since some goals require significant sacrifice. It does a good job with injury risk reduction, but doesn’t get so focused on that to lose sight of the performance improvement side of things.
What Type of Plan
Think about how you have exercised in the past or how you are exercising now. Think about your past injuries. Were they the result of a bad plan? Do you need to re-prioritize?