Injuries used to be an inevitable side effect of exercise. No longer. Learn and adopt these six rules for injury prevention, and you may never get injured again.

by Matt Fitzgerald

A few years ago, the Phoenix Suns looked more like an injury ward than a basketball team. Star point guard Steve Nash had missed multiple games due to chronic low-back pain, while the rest of the team struggled with various shoulder, hamstring, and knee injuries. Desperate for answers, the Suns hired the CEO of the National Academy of Sports Medicine, Mike Clark. Instead of plying traditional treatment techniques, he began diagnosing and correcting each player’s muscle imbalances. Although this didn’t instantly cure them, it did help prevent injuries from happening again or even in the first place. Three years later, Nash’s problems were significantly better, and Suns players missed fewer games due to injury than the majority of other NBA teams.

A large percentage of men miss a day of work each year due to a physical injury. Yet the Suns’ turnaround proves that you don’t need luck, good genes, or costly procedures to prevent and treat sports injuries. You need a new set of rules, ones that will make you a stronger, faster, and better athlete in the process.

Rule 1 — Be Balanced
Almost everyone has muscle imbalances, which occur when a muscle on one side of a joint becomes too tight, while the muscle on the opposite side gets weak. Pronounced imbalances restrict physical movement and can damage muscles, in addition to ligaments and cartilage. One of the most common imbalances is having tight hip flexors and weak glute muscles, which can cause hamstring strains, groin pain, and sciatica.

Muscle imbalances are so ubiquitous because of the inordinate amount of time we spend sitting. “In our computer-centric workforce, we sit all day and tend to adopt slouched postures,” says Darwin Fogt, owner of Evolution Physical Therapy in Culver City, California. Over time, prolonged slouching can create imbalances that predispose you to everything from low-back pain to shoulder tendonitis when you move from your desk or couch to the gym, pool, or golf course.

You might think that working out or playing a sport regularly would iron out any muscle disparities, but in fact, exercise can make them worse. If you’re a cyclist, for example, you can count on a hunched-over pedaling position to overdevelop your quads while keeping your glutes weak. Even the fittest or most muscular athletes have hidden imbalances that will increase their injury risk significantly unless they target and fix them. So while Usain Bolt can run the 100-meter dash in 9.58 seconds when he’s healthy, his career has been hampered by Achilles tendon and low-back injuries, both of which stem from the same kinds of muscle imbalances that plague weekend athletes.

As common as they are, muscle imbalances can at least be corrected. “If you stretch muscles that are overactive and strengthen muscles that are underactive, you can decrease your risk of injury and increase your performance,” says  Clark. The first step, though, is to identify your imbalances. Take this two-part DIY test, developed by Clark, to learn which muscles are weak.

Test 1: Overhead Squat Stand barefoot in front of a mirror with your feet shoulder-width apart and your arms extended overhead. Squat down to chair-height and then return to upright position. Repeat three times. If your feet turn outward as you squat, you probably have tight outer calves and weak inner calves. If your knees cave inward (move together), you may have weak glutes and tight adductors. If your lower back arches, you may have tight hip flexors, erector spine muscles, and weak abs and glutes. If your arms fall forward, you may have tight lat and pec muscles, and weak scapular muscles and rotator cuff muscles.

Test 2: Single-leg Squat Stand barefoot on one foot facing a mirror with hands on hips. Squat to a comfortable level and return to upright position. Repeat three times, switch feet, and then do three more squats. If your knees move inward, you may have tight groin muscles and weak glutes.

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