I’ve played sports since I was 12, when my favorite thing in the world was slinging softballs at evening ball games. As I’ve aged, I’ve fallen in love with other types of movement, like hot yoga, running and basketball. Not only does exercise get my heart pumping, but it helps me clear my head.
This isn’t true for everyone, although lots of us are trying to fit more movement into our lives. Only 23 percent of Americans meet the federal government’s fitness guidelines. Some experts say there’s more room for the fitness industry to educate beginners, who are just learning how to exercise in the right ways. Navigating the gym and all its machinery can be confusing and intimidating. In 2021, exercising at the gym with equipment accounted for just over 409,000 injuries in the US. The majority of these injuries happened in people age 25 to 64.
This year, I began dabbling in more intense strength training, and the gaps in my exercise knowledge showed. While lifting heavy weights, squatting and deadlifting barbells, I managed to get a dreaded knee injury.
During my recovery process, I learned three major pieces of advice about preventive care, especially how and where to get help if you suspect you’ve injured yourself during exercise. Drop your sweatband, ditch your pre-workout and read this before you try to crush your personal record.
1. Know the signs of an injury.
I began squatting last year on my own, without a personal trainer. As I added weight to the barbell, my knee hurt when I bent my left leg. I ignored it. Then, one day last spring, I decided to try CrossFit. In the class, I squatted, as usual — woke up the next day unable to walk.
I booked the earliest appointment I could find with a physical therapist. I found I had a medial meniscus tear, a very common knee injury. The meniscus is the cartilage in your knee that acts as a buffer between your shin and thigh bones. Around 10 percent of people tear it in their lifetime. It usually happens with age, as you wear your cartilage down.
Meniscus irritation is fairly common in people who do activities like CrossFit. With more extreme physical activity, there’s a fine line between normal discomfort and something worse.
If you’re experiencing one of these issues, New York City physical therapist Joseph LaVacca advises that you head to the doctor:
- Pain when you stress a joint
- Pain that doesn’t go away for a while after your workout
- Notable signs of tissue change or inflammation, which often shows up as swelling, redness and heat
- Any loss of function — how much you run, how much you lift — without a true explanation
2. Prepare
There’s mounting evidence that strength training is quite good for you. One recent study found that just 30 to 60 minutes of weight training per week can reduce your risk of dying from cancer or heart disease by up to 20 percent.
While I was excited about all the benefits, I wish I had better prepared myself before tackling more intense strength training. It would have saved my knee and a lot of time, money and emotional energy.
When you’re starting a new fitness regimen, have a plan to prevent both acute and overuse injuries. Acute injuries happen spontaneously, like from an unexpected fall or a twist in the wrong direction. Overuse injuries, like my meniscus tear, happen over time due to errors in technique and training. Along with improper form, I began adding weight to my lifts too quickly, which is a common training error.
Tennis elbow, runner’s knee or swimmer’s shoulder are other common overuse injuries. To avoid them, slowly work up to higher levels of difficulty, including by working out with a trainer or a knowledgeable friend.
“We see this with people who go from the couch to the gym very quickly and start without a slow ramp-up,” says James Higgins, another physical therapist in New York City. “If someone is a weekend warrior, they work out twice a week and ramp it up to five times a week, they get injured pretty quickly too.”
Warming up and cooling down are vital to injury prevention. Many fitness experts encourage people to jumpstart their workouts with mobility training, a series of exercises that increases your body’s range of motion.
Completing these types of exercises can help you maintain better form during movements like squats or deadlifts, which in turn prevents injuries. Stretching post-workout can also reduce your risk of injury by improving blood flow, releasing muscle tension and increasing your range of motion.
3. Talk to your doctor.
If you still get injured like I did, despite your preventive efforts, you should go to your primary care doctor, or straight to a physical therapist, depending on your insurance benefits. Your provider will conduct an assessment and determine treatment. If your injury can be treated with physical therapy, you might return to your routine in six to eight weeks.
“If a patient plateaus after a couple weeks, then it might be time to bring a doctor in, mainly physiatrists or orthopedic doctors,” Higgins adds.
Getting injured at the gym really is a bummer. I was away from my strength-training routine for two months before I was finally healed. Luckily, while treating my knee injury, I was able to find joy in other forms of movement, like long walks and online pilates classes.
LaVacca encourages patients in recovery to continue any forms of movement they safely can.
“People lose sense of themselves sometimes and become the body part that hurts,” he says. “I make sure to spend time guiding people back to their identity.”