MEANING: Being safe is generally great, because this will reduce risks of accident and injury for athletes. This means that your training schedule is less likely to be interrupted and your performance levels over time will be greater. However, if you play things too safe and never take any risks at all then you simply cannot push yourself beyond certain safe limits, and this can mean that you never realize your true athletic potential.
TYPES: There are many ways to reduce the risks of physical injury or burnout caused by over-training.
TIPS: Study technique carefully and do not add too much weight until you are confident that you have the technique 100% right. Think about what you eat, get better sleep, avoid training with idiots or ‘poseurs’. Avoid performance enhancing drugs and expensive powders and potions. A little caution early on (proper planning) will inevitably lead you on to accelerated performance later. Be patient! So many young people these days seem to want everything today (or preferably yesterday) and do not understand why they must put in tonnes of effort to achieve these things. Learn to take pride in your single-minded pursuit of excellence!
DETAIL:
Probably the most important way is to study the correct form of each exercise, and to enlist the help of anyone with more experience, like a personal trainer if you can afford one.
Having said that, in reality I often find that there ar many people using public gyms these days who seem to think that their way is the best or only way and they are quite happy to teach you how. But how do you know if they are showing you the right way or the wrong way? It is actually a fact of life that many gym people have very sensitive ego and do not like to be corrected or told they are wrong. If you are to learn and progess athletically then you should learn to spot such people – you can easily do this by checking online to see if what they have told you is correct. If you have doubts then you can ask other people.
Learn to figure it out for yourself and always take a pride in doing your exercises as close to perfection as possible.
As one of my young gym students once said “there seem to be many ‘blah blah people’ out there talking nonsense but rarely doing anything vaguely impressive.
I always tell my students (whatever their age or experience) to NOT cheat EVER, and I warn them that any kind of performance enhancing drug is just another way of cheating or cutting corners. Trust me – back in my day all of these temptations existed in and around public gyms – but I always shunned them because it was not my goal to be the next Arnold Schwarzenegger. Actually my personal dream was simply to run faster and faster and further and further. And through competiiton and a rare personal drive to better myself I had discovered at quite a young age that I did not need steroids or expensive food supplements to become good at sports – I just needed to put in some consistent hard work and effort, and ask as many questions of as many people as I could.
I can promise you that for every successful athlete or body builder that reaches the heights of success, there are hundreds of other poor guys who end up trashing their bodies or their minds by injecting ‘the gear’ and by becoming over-reliant on using artificial means to achieve their ends.
DON’T DO IT. Err on the side of caution and say no to the easy way out. Be proud. Be natural. If you have to turn all those corners yourself as a young person, without cutting the corners, then you will gain enormous knowledge which cheaters never attain.