How Prehab Exercises Prevent Embarrassing Gym Injuries from Happening to You
Prehab is one of the more popular buzzwords in fitness circles of late, especially those dominated by your gym’s token Paleo-eating, minimalist-shoe enthusiasts. It is, in effect, performing rehab exercises without the attendant injuries, because prehab is designed to prevent the problems that would land you in rehab from ever arising in the first place. (Hence, prehab. Get it? You get it.)
Most people, though, have only so much time they can commit to fitness and prefer to spend as much of that precious hour as possible doing the work of lifting weights or cranking on the treadmill. Setting aside 15 minutes for fancy stretches that just remind you of your own inveterate inflexibility feels like a waste. Thus, for help sorting through this trend, we turned to The Prehab Guys—Michael Lau, Craig Lindell, and Arash Maghsoodi, all of whom are doctors of physical therapy and strength and conditioning specialists—to find out why you might want to treat a hamstring pull that hasn’t even happened yet.
What, exactly, is “prehab”?
Mobility drills, yes, but the term also refers to developing good positioning habits that promote the long-term health of one’s body. For example, before deadlifting, a prehabber pays special attention to setting up with their feet, back, arms, and hands in the right places so that they activate the lift from their glutes, rather than with their back. They also take a few extra seconds to clear their minds before each set, since exercising while distracted often ends in undignified writhing.
Prehabbers apply the same intentionality to their everyday lives, too, whether they’re moving heavy furniture or enduring long hours in a cramped airplane seat. The idea is that by taking physical therapy principles and implementing them prospectively, you can train your joints and muscles not to get hurt.
I warm up before working out and cool down afterward. Is that prehab?
Yes, the concept includes the stretching you do at the gym. But also, if you sit in a desk chair all day, do you pay attention to how you sit, especially as morning turns to evening? You should. Instead of teaching a single perfect posture, the Prehab Guys like to say that the most important position for staying limber is your next one. This is where prehab goes beyond “fancy stretching”: You treat your body as an interconnected system and use the feedback it sends to figure out how to react.
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What does prehab prevent?
The Prehab Guys see a lot of knee, shoulder, ankle, and back injuries in their clinic, some caused by sports and others by the freak accidents that are just part of life. But many of the conditions they encounter result from what they refer to as “poor exercise programming” or “poor load management”—in other words, overdoing it. If you’re the type of person who is tempted to tackle another WOD when you still feel the lingering effects of the last one, you are also the type of person who would be wise to do some prehab.
How much time do I have to spend on this?
Ideally: five to ten minutes, targeted at the areas you plan on working that day. (The Prehab Guys have a handy video library of stretches and drills, so you can find exactly what you need.) If you’re in a hurry: air squats, for example, if squats are on the calendar. And if even that takes up too much of your time: the “World’s Greatest Stretch.”
This movement is actually a series of movements that begins with a low lunge, moves into a thoracic spine rotation and hamstring stretch, and concludes with a combination calf-and-shoulder mobility exercise. It treats your whole body, including your back, hips, knees, ankles, and groin. (Yes, you need to stretch there. Probably a lot.) Unlike other stretches, this one doesn’t involve any yanking or pulling on joints. You can do it anywhere, and you don’t need any equipment.
Outside of the gym, prehab requires only shifts in behavior, not extravagant allocations of time. If you wince whenever you tumble out of a car door, make it a point to plant one foot on the ground and activate your glutes and hamstrings in order to push yourself up. If your knees hurt when you reach down to tie your shoes, try bending at the hips. If you sweep the floor from right to left, try sweeping from left to right. (If you don’t sweep, sweep, you monster.)
And remember, think of any aches and pains that do occur as valuable warning signs that you’re doing something wrong, or too much, or both. As you learn to identify those red flags, that newfound prehab know-how will help you keep that unpleasantness from getting any worse.
