Challenging yourself without hurting yourself

When you put yourself on a workout program you will progress from the excitement of doing something new, to hating it and suffering through it to it becoming a part of your life. Once it becomes a part of your life it becomes natural to want to challenge yourself. Now you must protect yourself from causing injuries that stop you from being able to work out so it is necessary to properly define what that challenge will be.
Since I can’t run my initial version of cardio was walking. So to challenge myself I would alternate between increasing my distance and bettering my time. That is a safe challenge. Some friends suggested that I mix in some running during my walk, but there is no way my bad knee would allow that to happen. My goal wasn’t to hurt myself it was to make my normal routine more challenging. That really is all that challenging yourself means; it is simply making your normal routine more difficult. So if you are like me and walking the weight off you don’t have to run on bad knees to make it challenging you can simply walk farther or walk faster.
I take the same approach with strength training. The common weight training all of us men do is the bench press; there is just something about it that makes us feel like guys. So I had to find a way to challenge my bench press without doing any more damage to a bad shoulder (by now I am sure you can see why my wife jokes that I am held together with duct tape). Instead of trying to see how much I could press I shortened my rests and increased my reps. Again I made my normal routine more difficult, by definition a challenge.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to challenge yourself; in fact it is necessary if you want to keep making progress. The reality is your body will adapt to whatever you do in about twenty one days, so every three weeks you need to switch up what you are doing to keep challenging your body because it is through those challenges that progress is made. Just make sure you aren’t risking injury as you enact these challenges.

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