For certain activities, you must spend time in the gym.
I would argue that everyone has good reasons to train strength and cardio—for longevity, brain function, and clogged artery protection, to name a few—but if you exercise at high intensity, added outside work is mandatory:
- Competitive sports
- Pitting yourself against the elements
- Martial arts or self-defense preparation
Any activity where strength or size are advantages, and loads placed on the body are high or sudden.
Because strength training builds muscle mass, strength, and tendon/ligament resilience.
But there’s more to injury protection than this.
1. Adaptation and Entropy
There’s a cardinal rule in biology, as true for single-celled organisms as for elephants, whales, and humans.
Apply stress to an organism, and it will automatically adapt to overcome that stress.
The stress can’t destroy the organism, and the organism must have the capacity to adapt. But assuming you’re not trying to bench press 4,000 pounds and aren’t deathly ill, your pecs will get stronger.
This is well known; what is less appreciated is the converse, which is equally true:
Use it or lose it, because all things wind down.
Remove the stress or stimulus, and the organism doesn’t hold its place, it backslides; stop working out entirely and you get weaker.
Natural conclusion: to continue performing the full vocabulary of movement for an activity, you can’t stop performing the movements.
Preferably in a safe, sustainable way, so that refined adaptations can occur over time. Not just being able to twist into a particular position, but to twist and untwist strongly, powerfully, and gracefully, which takes progressive, long-term practice to achieve.
So: do all the movements, and do them in a cumulatively progressive way.
Or don’t, and inevitably lose the ability to do the movements.
2. Self-destruction
No matter how much you train for strength and resilience, you can put yourself in situations that undo all your effort in an instant.
You can sprint full speed… into a wall.
You can punch with full power… but miss your target and hyperextend your elbow.
You can trip and fall… and jerk your limbs sideways into the unyielding Earth.
Take the body past its limits, and it breaks; this happens when the training wheels and guard rails get removed.
Conclusion: You literally don’t want to hurt yourself. Because you can put your body in situations exceeding its tensile strength, and in my experience, this is how you’re most likely to get injured.
Don’t run faster than your guardian angel can fly.
And back to yoga and cheetahs
I’ve said this before: cheetahs don’t do wind sprints, and rhinos don’t set aside a neck day.
If we lived lives where our daily activities took us through all our joints’ range of motion, allowing progressive development of strength, power, speed, endurance, and grace, there’d be no need for additional bodywork.
There’s a video of a grandfather in India, doing more things in the day than most all of us combined. And he still does yoga, because farming, carrying, walking, etc. don’t cover all the movement bases.
What’s the X-factor? It’s not just adding range of motion to your workout routine, although that’s great. We need a mobility adaptation, with modern life demanding minimal, mostly repetitive movement.
I propose that the key element is moving with grace and control.
Being able to move, sometimes in odd positions, without freezing up, clenching, or flailing in fear.
Being able to move, slow and easy. Or maybe kinda fast, but still easy.
In control at all times. Easy-peasy.
Yoga.
Why this matters whether you’re sporty or not
If you’re athletic, then moving with smoothness, fluidity, and ease reduces your risk of injuring yourself. Trauma-proofing your connective tissue is straightforward: hit the gym. But being awkward, clenching in unfamiliar positions, or thrashing in panic—the opposite of smooth fluidity—ups your odds of tearing something. Yoga-type bodywork offsets this.
What if you have no desire to pit yourself against others trying to outdo you?
I would argue that even if you read books in clean, well-lighted places and are a hugger, you’re still in competition. There’s this thing called sarcopenia that everyone over 35 is competing with, whether they realize it or not.
Every year from around 40 onward, your muscle mass diminishes a fraction of a percent. And the older you are, the more rapid the rate of loss, approaching 1% per year. Losing up to 40% of your muscle mass by the time you’re 80 is a scary thought, and why the very elderly are often frail elderly.
The answer is usually promoting increased strength and muscle mass, by upping protein intake and dedicated resistance training. Older patients absolutely get into trouble from weakness. But just as frequently, I’ve seen problems stem from lack of balance, stumbling, and being unable to catch themselves.
They’ve lost familiarity and comfort with certain types of movement.
The same root problem as athletes who don’t train broadly to maintain ease and fluidity.
Action Item
Pay attention to how you move this week, particularly to any moments of awkwardness or struggle, like getting up from a low seat or the floor, or getting startled when backing up into something. Consider whether it’s from a strength or a coordination/mobility deficit. Then address what you find.
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