 Rick Kaselj |
Rick Kaselj is a personal trainer that focuses on helping clients overcome their injuries. Rick’s specialization is the shoulder and did his Masters’ degree project on designing effective exercises for the rotator cuff. He shares with rotator cuff injury suffers and fitness professionals what he has learned in school and from his clients and has put it all into the Effective Rotator Cuff Exercise Program.
Exercises for Injuries Feedback
This is the first of what will hopefully be a series of posts by Rick about injury prevention and rehabilitation. Although you won’t learn about the finer details of effective rotator cuff exercises or knee injury prevention in this post, I do hope it will encourage you to think about your own aches and pains.
After reading this piece, please take a moment to leave a comment and let us know:
- which muscles or joints bothers you the most
- which injuries have set you back a month or more in your training
- which body parts do you most want to keep healthy as you age
- basically: which exercises for injuries do you want to know more about
Your feedback will help Rick to figure out what Rick should write about next. Thanks!
Prehab is Vital for Any Workout Routine
If you want to build mass, get stronger, or lose fat through intense exercise, then you must do some PREHAB.
I know what you are thinking when you hear the word, “prehab.” You are thinking of those exercises that physical therapists give injured people, but that is not prehab. That is “rehab”, or rehabilitation. Rehab means you are already injured, which tells me your prehab efforts have either failed or were ignored.
Prehab is also not those crazy exercises that you see that new guy doing in the gym. You know the ones, “The Hidden Asian Secret” exercises involving lots of jerky movements and funny noises. No, that is not prehab. Actually, those types of exercises will more often than not cause you to need REHAB.
Prehab is short for PRE-habilitation. It is not a real word, but it does mean something very important in the fitness world. It means that if you focus some effort to PRE-venting injury, you might never need to re-HAB. In short, we call it PREHAB. Makes sense?
Before I show you some prehab movements, let me hit the 3 big reasons why you need to do some prehab.
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To Build Mass
Yes, I said it, to build mass.
Taking a few minutes to do some prehab movements will loosen up the muscles around your joints, warm up your joints and wake up all of those smaller muscles around the joint.
This all sets up your body to push hard and build mass.
Not a bad deal.
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Improve Your Lift
Taking a few minutes to do some prehab will improve your lift.
This will loosen up things around your joints so you get more movement in the joint and you can lift more weight.
Just taking a few minutes to do the right movements will get you there.
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Prevent Injuries
I know, no one works out to avoid injuries.
I have yet to hear someone say, “I am going to the gym to workout so I can avoid injuries.”
Lets be truthful, you don’t want your workout to lead to an injury. You want to keep working out and keep getting bigger.
Doing a few prehab movements will keep you on that path of getting bigger and off the path of, “I got to take this week off from chest because I did something to my shoulder.”
The right prehab movement will keep you on the right track and off the wrong path.
Final Words on Prehab
Before I go, you do not need to do a lot of prehab movements or spend hours doing them.
A few minutes and that is it.
I will share a few of them in the next blog post for you.
I think that is it. If you have any questions, just let me know and leave a comment below and I will answer it.
Rick Kaselj, MS
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Tags: exercise, fitness, health, injuries, injury, injury prevention, knees, mobility, pain, prevent, rotator cuff, shoulders, stability
Prehab is a Necessity in Any Muscle Building Routine…
An introduction to one of my favorite injury experts, Rick Kaselj. He tells us why we need to pre-habilitate to protect ourselves from injury. Rick intends to write several articles on this topic, so ……
Hi, this is a interesting post and i will make a prehab routine because my only problem i have is my shoulder and is mostly the right one and i think is because of baseball. sometimes when i make some type of move slowly it kinda feel like something is gonna pop. and when i rotate it, it feels like a little bit of my bone crushing is weird. also is not like a problem i have that i cant do bench because it hurt no that much but is something i would love to take care of because sometimes i just feel weak that i cant even rotate a gallon of milk without feeling something. thank you i hope you can answer this reply 😀
Good article. I’m looking forward to the series. I’m interested in knee, lower back, and shoulder prehab. I’ve injured each, and do some things preventatively, but could do more!