How to protect your knees and shoulders

Knees and shoulders are key joints not only for crossfit but in life. The first bit starts in your warm up, now as the coach is working through the warm-up there has to be some responsibility given to yourself to use this time to make sure everything is feeling right and moving well. The job of the warm up is to put the body through a slowly increasing intensity and range of motion exercises to prepare you for the workout. If you rush your warm up and you move through the movements without any thought of keeping your shoulder blades back or knees out, then that bad posture is more than likely to be carried over to the workout. If you aren’t warming up with intention and consciously activating the muscles around the joints, when you start in the workout your body may not be using the right muscles in the right order. Another tip is being aware and taking responsibility of your own limits. Now going up in weight when you know that your last rep wasn’t perfect is an example of being careless. The number one goal of any session is perfect practice of perfect posture. If the weight is too heavy then you will see a breakdown in the posture of the body, if you continue to practice with this breakdown of posture (e.g. knees rolling in, chest dropping, back bending, shoulder rolling forward) then this would immediately indicate risk of possible injury. So what I would recommend to help protect the knees and shoulders is ask your Coach to have a look at your posture and get a movement assessment for key movements. This will show you the correct body position that you need to be in for the movement your practicing then as you start to go through your warm ups you focus your energy into holding perfect posture, motor recruitment and muscle engagement.

If you identify that you have a weakness maybe in the posterior delt or the glute medialis for example, then before or after the workout do some extra activation work of 10-15 reps over 4 sets. This could be something like rear delt flys for shoulders or laying glute raises for the glutes and hamstrings. Remember 80% of your training is done on your core lifts, 20% comes down to accessory work and skill practice. 

Coach Joe

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