BODY BY EMILEE

WHY YOU SHOULD BE CROSS-TRAINING

I absolutely LOVE running, truly one of my most favorite things to do .  However, I only run 2-3 days a week.  WHY?  3 reasons: CONDITIONING, INJURY PREVENTION and ACTIVE RECOVERY. In an effort to improve my fitness and achieve my best physical form, I cross train. In order to avoid hitting a plateau, your muscles need to be challenged with different movements, different weights and different workouts. Pushing yourself out of your comfort zone and incorporating different resistance workouts and forms of cardio is the best way to get results and keep your muscles fresh. Cross training is a highly effective and productive way to workout. Because you are combining several different workout strategies, you are going to improve your conditioning, avoid injury and engage your muscles in active recovery. Cross training is gaining popularity for many reasons.  Read more about my top 3 reasons below:

• CONDITIONING: Instead of asking your body to do the exact same thing over and over, you surprise your muscles by performing a variety of movements and exercises. You can even further change you workouts by increasing the intensity, number of reps, duration, pace, switching up the order of exercises, etc. Variety and change ask more from the body and produce increased muscle capability and improved fitness performance. Cross training is not designed with one specific goal in mind, but rather to improve your overall fitness. Cross-training is comprehensive. You can gain muscle, lose fat, improve your cardiovascular strength, improve speed and performance; conditioning your body to perform at it's optimum level.

• INJURY PREVENTION: The most common injuries I see are overuse injuries as a result of continuously doing the same activities and workouts. It doesn't matter if it is running, biking, lifting or plyometrics. Constantly performing repeitive movements and exercises can stress your body and wear down your joints, ligaments, muscles and tendons. By mixing up your routine, you give the over-used parts of your body a chance to rest and the under-used a chance to strengthen. Cross training is a great way to avoid injuries and keep your body healthy!

• ACTIVE RECOVERY: Active recovery is the practice of using an alternative type of training to recover from your primary training method. For instance, many professional football players do swimming workouts and pool resistance exercises to actively recover from their on-field practices and traditional weight room training. In addition to the conditioning and injury preventing benefits of active recovery, it has been show to actually speed up recovery by increasing blood flow and the delivery of nutrients to stressed or damaged muscle tissue.

Get out there and try something new!  Switch up your workouts and I think you will be pleasantly surprised by the results!  You will see an improvement in your overall fitness, avoid injuries and be able to maximize your efforts by engaging in active recovery!  HAVE FUN! : )