The Injury Risk Paradox
Written by Kyle Ligon - MovementLink Head Coach
“I don’t want to get hurt.”
“My knees can’t handle that.”
“I’m too old for that.”
Are these phrases holding you back?
In this article, I am going to explore how this type of thinking not only stops people from exercising in ways most beneficial to life, but also limits even the fit who may have forgotten that we are not made of glass, especially when we are fit.
There is a training injury paradox — the results of exercise clearly benefit being resilient to injury, but the exercise itself can cause injury. The truth is, most fears of getting hurt are rooted in a lack of understanding that the aspects of working out that actually cause injuries are very easy to avoid. To start, here are the 3 most likely culprits of injuries:
1. Poor technique (relative to intensity)
When most people imagine getting injured working out, they imagine an incident, like something going wrong on a heavy deadlift. Although there are deeper reasons for this type of injury that we’ll discuss later, this type of injury can occur when there is a mismatch between the level of technique and the intensity performed on the rep — meaning either the weight, speed, and/or fatigue of your reps is beyond what you can handle maintaining or beyond your commitment to quality technique.
The solution is actually very simple and is central to MovementLink’s approach to workouts, working out For Intent, Intensity, and Technique (F.I.I.T.) When you are pushing the intensity, only push the intensity as much as you can while maintaining good technique. As an example, if you’re going for a 1 rep max, replace thinking that you are going to find the most weight you can possibly lift no matter what into finding a 1 rep technical max, the most weight you can lift with good technique. When you don’t allow sloppy reps to count, you massively shrink the amount of sloppy reps you perform.
This style of balancing the priorities between technique and intensity is called threshold training and not only reduces risk of injury tremendously, but I believe it is the most effective training strategy even if we only cared about improving performance and didn’t take injury risk into account. Have you ever seen a professional athlete of any kind without amazing technique? No. It’s simple, unless you are building your technique alongside your intensity, your performance will always be limited by the mismatch.
On the other extreme however, we don’t want to fall into the trap of not doing an exercise because our technique is bad. It’s important to remember that EVERYONE’s technique is bad when they have no or little experience with something. Bad technique should be paired with lower intensities and an effort to improve technique. As technique improves, you earn your way to higher and higher intensities. That’s the game.
2. Overuse (relative to tissue tolerance and recovery)
Although getting injured during an intense rep is what people seem to be most worried about most, overuse injuries are by far the most common and, often, are at the root cause of the former. Based on our past experiences, our muscles, tendons, ligaments have a maximum amount of stress that they have adapted to tolerate - their tissue tolerance. Over time, through training and exposure, the tolerance of our tissues increases, so our bodies can handle more and more stress.
When we use our bodies more than they have adapted to be able to handle is when we are at the highest risk of nagging pains or even that devastating single strength training rep people are worried about.
This overuse can happen in an individual workout, but it is much more common as an accumulated effect of weeks/months of working out more than your body is effectively recovering from.
Overuse injuries are especially common when starting new things. Elbows, knees, shoulders, hip flexors, you name it, when you start a new hobby or up your workout program, it is super common to be introduced to using something more than you’re used to, especially a new repetitive motion. Swinging a golf club or pickleball paddle, running, etc., all will require extremely repetitive motions. Over time, you’ll be able to adapt to high amounts of reps, but when you’re starting out, excited about your new venture, it’s easy to over-do it relative to what your body has adapted to and can recover from.
This is also where a foundation of functional movement plays a major role when learning something new. If you are a bodybuilder or a runner, learning to swing a pickleball paddle, etc. may be a completely novel movement pattern. But, when you understand the relationship between swinging, jumping, kettlebell swings, and DB snatches, and have included these functional exercises in your workout program, then your skill and tissue tolerance will have an enormous head start in your new hobbies (WOMM June 2025 - Functional Exercises Must Be Done In Functional Ways to Actually be Functional).
There’s an additional component most don’t realize — Muscles and tendons/ligaments adapt and improve at different rates. We can improve our cardio the fastest, with significant changes in weeks/months, but muscles take months/years to develop and connective tissues (tendons and ligaments) take even longer, measured in years. This imbalance of adaptation speeds contributes to making overuse injuries so common in new activities. We get fitter and stronger faster than our connective tissues, so it’s easy to overwork them.
Take running for example, an activity where a large majority (50%-90% depending on what study you’re looking at) get injured each year. When you know about the different rates of cardio, muscle, and connective tissue development, it is easy to imagine someone’s cardio improvements allowing them to run beyond what their connective tissues are capable of. This does not make running bad, but it does make it easy to get a mismatch between stress and recovery of connective tissues, especially with those new to running because of the years it takes to build up ligaments and tendons effectively.
This is a major reason why cross-training is so important, especially for newbies. It not only would provide a foundation to not start from zero, but when it is going to take years for a newbie's tissue tolerance for running to significantly improve, they can avoid overuse by cross-training while their running tissues are recovering.
Solutions to Overuse: A high quality, holistic cross-training program that manages the amount of work into optimal levels, spreads it out across different areas of fitness, and manages work and recovery for each body part.
Many fitness enthusiasts are overworking thinking more is always better, but your body doesn’t care what you personally want the best training approaches to be, it only responds best to the best training approaches. Once you understand how much exercise is enough, SRA curves, and some basics of workout programming, it’s pretty simple to put yourself in an optimal range that dramatically reduces risk and not tip over into the working out too much, overtraining range.
High quality technique with functional movement patterns uses our body how it has evolved to be used and increases the amount of work our body can handle as it optimizes which muscles are being used, joint angles, and the stresses on ligaments and tendons. Better, functional technique reduces the chance of overuse.
The amount your body can handle is unknowable, so listen to your body. Overuse is not just about an absolute number of repetitive exercises you’re doing, but it’s relative to your previous experience, recovery, and lifestyle habits. Those who do 10 or more minutes of mobility every day, sleep, eat healthy, and go for walks after meals are going to be able to handle more work and will recover and adapt faster.
3. Under Recovered
This is really just an extension of overuse except that sometimes our injury doesn’t show up where and when you would expect it. Just like those who are chronically overtraining and nearing an overuse injury are at much higher risk of getting injured during a workout or their sport, they are also at a higher risk of getting injured just doing a regular everyday activity too. Most of the time, it’s as simple as bending down to pick up something, even something very light, off the ground. What caused the injury was not the act of picking something up, it was the weeks/months leading up to it that had a mismatch of stress and recovery.
The key takeaway I want you to have from all of this is that yes, injury risk is present, especially at higher intensities, but when we know the most likely culprits and proactively manage those risks in our workout program planning and how we execute our workouts, the risks during exercise can be managed down to fractions of a percent.
A simple question I want to address is why we don’t just avoid higher intensities. It’s simple, intensity may be the single biggest determinant of the results you’ll get from exercise. If there’s no intensity, there’s also no meaningful results.
Luckily, because of the benefits driven by intensity, when done intelligently, it’s a game where the better you get at the game, the less and less likely you are to get injured, not just in the gym, but out in the real world too.
The benefits related to injury prevention that someone following a holistic functional fitness program (that includes significant intensity, but paired with technique) and integrating healthy lifestyle habits would enjoy are profound:
Improved strength.
Improved muscle mass.
Improved bone density.
Improved tendon and ligament strength and joint stability.
Improved body composition.
Improved ranges of motion and flexibility.
Improved balance.
Improved body mechanics and coordination.
Improved heart and organ health.
Improved brain function.
Improved immune system.
Improved recovery and regeneration.
Decrease of muscle imbalances.
Decreased inflammation.
Decreased stress…
There is definitely more, but you get the idea. Practically every single attribute listed above would be something that would be a no-brainer to choose if it were offered for free, and most of these benefits are only available through a quality exercise program and strategic lifestyle habits. There are no pills that will get you the vast array of benefits that exercise will bring.
Let’s look at the injury risk from another angle:
If two people were to slip and fall to the ground, who is more likely to get injured? Someone who does not exercise or someone who is functionally fit? I think after seeing all the benefits of exercise it’s clear that the fitter person is likely to be much more resilient to injury. Not only are they less likely to fall in the first place, but if they do, their body is more likely to hold up from impacts and weird angles because of their muscles, strength, bone density, flexibility, and joint and tendon strength. They’ll also be able to recover faster because of their overall health and wellness and immune system.
There are countless anecdotes I’ve heard where the result of a traumatic incident was unexpectedly minor due to the person’s fitness. This topic is especially top of mind because Coach Kelly recently got into a very scary car wreck. Luckily, she has a tremendously resilient body which helped her walk away with just bumps and bruises where less fit individuals would have surely sustained much more serious injuries.
Scientific evidence overwhelmingly suggests that strength trained athletes are less likely to get injured than non-strength trained athletes with meta analyses consistently showing strength training can reduce sports injuries by more than 50% and overuse injuries by more than half.
Let me summarize how to reduce injury risk, not just in the gym, but across your life:
Consistently follow a holistic functional fitness program centered around developing functional movement patterns, workout FIIT, and pair it with healthy lifestyle habits.
Your weights, exercises, and intensities you use should be progressed based on what your technique can handle. The more you push beyond what you can perform with quality technique, the more risk you add.
The exercises you choose to use should have a good risk:reward ratio. In our opinion, heavy barbell snatches are a great example of an exercise that carries too much risk relative to the reward (Why we do not perform heavy barbell snatches) - we can mimic almost 100% of the benefits of the heavy barbell snatch with variations of the barbell clean and the kettlebell swing, both of which carry significantly less risk.
I’ve had a few little aches and pains here and there, but I have not had an injury from working out in 10+ years (that’s when I started developing the MovementLink Method). I’ve played many sports, ride a OneWheel electric skateboard, and have put in over 2,600 hours of working out (4-6 hours, mostly MovementLink classes, most weeks), mostly at high intensities, done GORUCK events, Spartan Races, Tough Mudders, Multi-day Bike Rides...what do I have to show for it?
I’ve fallen down a hill on a trail run and escaped with only a few scrapes. I’ve flipped over the handlebars on my bike, hurt my wrist a little, but nothing serious, broken, or long-term. I don’t have an injured, beat up body, like many would expect, it’s a flexible body that has built up incredible resiliency and years of being healthy and active. Even with my active lifestyle, my injury risk is likely just fractions of 1 percent, an amount I am extremely OK with. I know I am not invincible and accept the consequences of the risks that I do take on, but,even at 40, with my fitness, I am likely the most resilient I have ever been in my life. If I do get injured, my fitness affords me an improved ability to recover from it. I am far from a thrill seeker, but I also don’t want to live my life on the sidelines trying to minimize my chance of injury to a zero. I have confidence in my body.
