Avoiding Muscle Injuries

I'm not a professional on this topic, but I can offer some tips and ideas on how to avoid tearing something or pulling it.

First off, I recommend you only work out to your limits, and not past them. That doesn't mean doing shoulder presses until it hurts or you can't pick the bar back up. So much for every other exercise. Your stamina and endurance is what your limits are made out of. You listen to your stamina and endurance to avoid hurting yourself.

   Your muscles are like a car engine, the more they're worked without a break, the more tired they get, so they require a rest, cool down time. A car engine breaks down if it's overheated, say it's been running twenty thousand miles straight without a stop, that would mess it over, same goes for your muscles. 

   But your body doesn't overheat with something like that going on, it just stops working until it's gathered the proper energy back together and has repaired itself fully. Or on the occasion, if it's been overworked, something will break, go out of place, or tear, and then it will stop working.

   The key to success and not hurting yourself is, work to your limits and not past them. Yes I know, how are you going to go past your limits if you're only working up to them? That's the thing about the human body, if you work up to your limits, and only continue to do so, you work very hard with your limits, and slowly they expand. Instead of jumping way ahead into something, you won't fall over and hurt yourself or drop the bar on your chest and get crushed.

   So avoiding muscular injuries in exercise is very simple, you do the crazy things you want to do, but you build yourself up to doing them. You have to build instead of jump, there's a reason your body will tell you when to stop, and that's so it won't hurt itself. 

   And then of course you do have the occasional freak accident, that will happen once in a while to that unlucky guy and it'll cause him to either go to the hospital or just not be able to perform various movements for some time.

   Nobody ever said exercise was completely safe, but you can be safe in exercising by doing things right instead of wrong. I personally much prefer a hard but safe workout instead of an easy and unsafe workout. 

   Believe it or not, you can do an easy but unsafe workout. You can do things with the wrong form, too fast, or just in plain stupidity. It happens and people get hurt by doing that all of the time. 

   But a safe and hard workout, with a straight back, perfect form, done right, not moving too fast or too slow, just right, and it keeps you out of harms way. Certain exercises, you have more chance of hurting yourself going too fast, like bench press, and then others such as curls, if you go too slow, you have more time to hurt yourself because the muscles are under prolonged stress. Pressing exercises and pulling exercises are much more different from each other. So with safety comes less injury. Do so and exercise serves you well.