Injury can occur in almost any time. It can occur when you are walking on the street and hurt your ankle, or when you strain your back while lifting a household item. Accidents happen and, of course, are unplanned, but there are things you can do to make your body more adaptable and resilient to injury.
Resilience is how your body absorbs and adapts to stress — especially when unexpected. Those with higher levels of resilience recover from an injury quicker. Here are ten simple ways to make your body more resilient.
1. Try Progressive Overload
You can increase your body’s natural ability to be physically resilient with progressive overload. This is when you push yourself slightly past your current limits. Your body overcomes its current restraints repetitively when you go into overload, which creates a higher resilience.
2. Focus on Adaptability
Adaptability occurs after you overload progressively. Once you recover from the consistent stress you put on your body, it increases the amount you can take. You adapt to new stimuli and help the body become more resilient. If you do not continuously push yourself into overload, you cannot adjust — therefore, resilience will not increase.
3. Use Different Movements
Strength and resilience go hand in hand, but there is more to it than that. You create more variety when you explore new movements outside your typical pattern. Your brain becomes familiar with a broader range of options to practice and become resilient to.
4. Practice Flexibility
Flexibility allows you to move in an extensive range of motion. With this level of body control and awareness, you become stronger and more mobile. It can naturally fix your posture over time as well. Moving in various ways can help you withstand unexpected traumas and may put your body in a position it’s not used to while practicing flexibility.
5. Use Groundwork Movements
Groundwork is a great place to start if you have good base-level strength but lack lower-body fitness. If you are practicing groundwork at home, floorings like laminate or carpet are good options to practice this on since they are softer and are best to reduce joint pains.
An example of something you can try is hopping. It’s a more fundamental movement where your hands and feet move in short, controlled patterns. You can do this at your skill level and work out new exercises to build resilience.
6. Move at Your Own Level
Making sure you move at your own pace is essential to building resiliency. If you push yourself too much, you could end up having what you did not want to happen — an injury. Practice movements at your specific skill set and be sure you’re continuously challenging yourself, but not to a point where it becomes unbeneficial. Find the sweet spot that allows you to practice while still being fun and functional.
7. Train Transition Movements
Once you have down your basic movements and want to move into something a little more challenging, transition movements are a great spot to start. Figure out how to blend all your basic movements into one using creativity to get from one position to another. You may discover your body seamlessly blends into each movement with a transition that can help your flexibility and resiliency.
8. Challenge Your Self-Talk
Many people let their brains take over when trying to train their bodies. You may think you can’t push yourself to the next level. Challenge what your brain is telling you in times like this. Your body can take more than what your mind tells you. Try out the next movement or weight when building your resistance and see how it turns out — you may be surprised.
9. Work on Mental Resilience
When you feel stress, the brain immediately reacts to it, so work on how your body reacts to stress to deal with it better. Your mental resiliency is just as important as your physical resiliency. Being able to sort through times of stress efficiently is an excellent skill.
10. Get Rid of Right and Wrong
When training movements for resilience, there is no correct way to do them. It could only be wrong if it can hurt yourself or others. Forget about pressuring yourself to get to a higher skill level and invest your time to become a stronger, more mobile version of yourself.
Increasing Your Body’s Resilience
Whether you’re just starting with fitness or are looking for ways to push yourself, there are plenty of safe and exciting ways to do so. Remember to challenge your body but not put so much strain on it that you injure yourself. You can slowly make your body more resilient with these 10 simple tips.
By Jack Shaw, a writer specializing in the men’s lifestyle niche.
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