With many people making regular exercise a New Year’s resolution, it’s clear that exercise is an inseparable part of our lives. However, the notion that diligent exercise leads to guaranteed health is a fallacy! Exercise that doesn’t suit you or is unbalanced can be harmful. Before starting to exercise, it’s important to check your body’s condition and develop a suitable exercise plan to ensure that your workouts are beneficial, not detrimental.
If You Have Back Pain, Avoid Sit-ups
Many people who want to lose belly fat do sit-ups, but this is one of the exercises that people with back pain should avoid. If a person with back pain does sit-ups, it can put more pressure on the disc, causing damage. On the contrary, if you don’t do sit-ups, the disc can heal and the pain can decrease.
Avoid Stretching that Bends the Waist
Also, people with back pain should not do stretching that bends the waist. Due to weak waist muscles, some people lie down and lift their legs or do waist muscle exercises that bend and stretch the waist, but these exercises can also increase the pressure inside the disc and worsen symptoms.
Exercise on an Empty Stomach Should Be Done with Caution
Excessive exercise can strain the muscles and increase the risk of hypoglycemia. Especially, intense exercise or long hikes on an empty stomach can further increase the risk of hypoglycemia. People with diabetes are aware of this and prepare for it, but people who don’t know they have diabetes have a hard time preparing for it. Not only diabetes, but depending on the presence of accompanying complications, you should rest, and if pneumonia, visual impairment, heart disease, or respiratory disease appears, you should immediately refrain from exercise.
Check for Allergies or Breathing Difficulties
Sometimes, exercise can cause anaphylaxis, which results in breathing difficulties. This is due to the symptoms of ‘exercise-induced hypersensitivity’, an exercise allergy disease, which can be accompanied by nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, dizziness, and hypotension. It can occur not only when doing aerobic exercise, but also when suddenly doing strenuous work, and hives can occur as the intensity of exercise increases, and the eyes or lips can swell up.
Be Careful When Doing Anaerobic Exercise
If a person with high blood pressure does excessive exercise, it can trigger heart attacks or strokes, thereby harming their health. Especially, doing sudden strenuous anaerobic exercises like lifting heavy weights can be dangerous, and if you have high blood pressure, it’s good to only do about 30 minutes of fast walking three times a week. The intensity of the exercise should start gradually and increase incrementally.
What if You Are an Asthma Patient?
If you are an asthma patient, you need to be careful when exercising. This is due to ‘exercise-induced asthma’, where symptoms don’t appear normally but only when exercising. When the airways become dry and cold due to exercise, the muscles around the airways contract, causing asthma. Especially for children, management is difficult, so if you have exercise-induced hypersensitivity or asthma, parents need to be careful.
CrossFit Tests the Limits of Your Physical Strength
Have you ever heard the joke that the orthopedic clinics and traditional Korean medicine clinics around CrossFit gyms are thriving? CrossFit, which involves high-intensity workouts in a short time, is an attractive exercise but it’s also a tough one. Disc injuries are the most common and the safety of each movement is important, so you must always do it with a skilled professional. Choose the weight and movement that suits you and exercise at a speed that won’t break your body to maximize the effect. If muscle pain occurs, lightly massage to relax the fascia.
Exercising Early in the Morning in Winter is Dangerous
When the cold morning air touches our bodies, our blood vessels contract. When the blood vessels contract, the supply of blood decreases and the heart has to work faster than usual to raise the falling body temperature which can also raise blood pressure. Therefore, people with high blood pressure or elderly people who are vulnerable to temperature changes should be careful when exercising in winter. When going out to exercise in cold weather, dress in multiple layers of thin clothes and cover your neck or head, etc., where heat escapes, to minimize the areas where the cold wind touches your body.
Avoid Rapid Bulking Up
While you may be pleased with the thickened muscles in your shoulders and chest from bulking up, excessive bulking up can excessively stretch the fascia, pressuring the nerves or blood vessels in the fascia and reducing blood circulation. This can lead to tendon rupture, and blood circulation disorders due to vascular pressure, and you may even need to take painkillers. When bulking up, use a weight that suits your bone strength and gradually increase the intensity of your exercise. It’s also a good idea to objectively analyze and evaluate your physical strength with a professional.
Golf and Tennis Can Lead to One-Sided Arm Injuries
Golf is one of the exercises where balance can easily be broken because you use your body in one direction. To increase the distance, if you rotate your body quickly, your spine can be excessively twisted, and there are also complaints of elbow pain, known as golf elbow. Tennis also uses one arm a lot, so it can cause pain in the elbow or wrist. Before starting to exercise, gently rotate your elbows, shoulders, and torso to relax your body, and it’s also good to use a stretching band to relax the muscles in both arms.
By. Shin Young Jeon
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