Get Your Body Healthy

Low Impact aerobics, yoga, ‘Callanetics’, ‘Aquarobics’ or ’stretch and tone’ are the main systems  being touted as the ultimate in safe training, mainly because they usually avoid all movements which may produce an impact on contact with any surface.

While this may be true under certain circumstances, it is not generally true, since  high impact exercise is not the only way of producing large forces in the muscles and other components of the musculoskeletal system.   For instance, prolonged stretching using even moderate static force can cause plastic deformation of the ligaments, muscle fasciae or other connective tissues.

What needs to be appreciated is that injury to the body is not necessarily caused by large external forces.   The magnitude and direction of the stresses and strains produced at a joint by the force are more important than the magnitude of the force alone.  Moreover, some tissues can dissipate energy more efficiently than others.  Many of the body’s soft tissues, such as most tendons and ligaments, are viscoelastic.  This means that under low rates of loading, they behave by flowing slowly like any other viscous substance, whereas, at high rates of loading, they behave like an elastic band.

A relatively small force exerted at a large distance from a joint can produce a very large moment or torque at the joint (remember that Torque equals force times perpendicular distance from the line of action of the force to the turning point).  Thus,  straight-arm flyes and straight-leg deadlifts in the gym, and high kicks, extended floor-travelling moves and long stretching movements in the aerobics class can produce excessively large torque on vulnerable joints.

Even very small forces repeated to the point of local muscle exhaustion, as in ‘Callanetics’, may result in soft tissue damage, particularly if local blood supply, efficiency of protective reflexes and neuromuscular coordination are impaired.

You may even injure yourself by executing low impact movements before you have warmed up adequately or not learned the appropriate skills for carrying out each manoeuvre correctly and safely.  Remember that there is no such thing as an unsafe exercise; only an unsafe way of carrying out an exercise.

Reliance on low impact as the sole form of training may even be counterproductive if your daily life subjects  you to activities that may produce stresses and strains in a variety of directions which  your training has not prepared you to handle.   For example, if you religiously avoid squatting, flexing the lumbar spine, rotating your head through full circles, lifting loads off the ground, jumping or raising loads above your head, then you might injure yourself while doing similar movements in your garden, kitchen, office or bathroom, or while playing with your children.

The important role played by the inclusion of a certain amount of regular impulsive loading in strengthening the musculoskeletal system and minimising the occurrence of joint deterioration has already been discussed and is entirely relevant to this topic (see Ch5 under the heading “All impact loading training should be avoided”).

Sensible physical conditioning means exercising the body and mind to enable to cope not only with your daily aerobics session, but also with the far greater demands of daily living.

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