What scares a fitness trainer most when dealing with beginning resistance exercise participants? The fears associated with the awkwardness in beginner movement performance and the presumed vulnerability to resulting injury. As it turns out, beginners are not so vulnerable to injury as we have been led to believe.

Actually, given proper preliminary instruction and the assistance of an experienced and extremely attentive spotter, a beginner's risk of injury should be no greater than that of the most experienced of resistance trainees. In fact, the seasoned resistance trainee may be even more susceptible to injury than the beginner!

How can this be?

Watch an uninstructed beginner struggle under a barbell while performing a set of bench presses sometime. It's not a pretty sight, is it? There are two inherent contributing factors to the beginner's risk of injury that can easily be avoided.

#1- A general disregard for proper movement instruction altogether. Even before spotting, proper movement instruction and demonstration is imperative in minimizing risk of beginner injuries. The emphasis on strict form before as well as during exercise performance is crucial. The extent and degree of the instruction early-on must be demanding of the beginner in terms of applied fundamental correctness in biomechanical positioning. In other words, the basic fundamental positioning and movement performance must be articulated clearly by the fitness trainer and understood fully by the new resistance exercise participant. Monitoring correctness in form is a spotter's most fundamental responsibility.

#2-Extremely poor spotting technique or lack of spotting altogether. Either of these conditions, in the beginner, are responsible for a loss of balance when using free weight. What starts out as a loss of balance can quickly turn into a total loss of control. It is the loss of control that is most likely to result in acute injury among beginners. While using free weight equipment, not providing for "groove" movements (machines), there is an inherent need for synergistic muscles to provide balance. Prior to the conditioning of these synergistic muscles in the beginner, a spotter should, ever so slightly, make corrections in balance. In correcting balance errors while minor, loss of control is prevented along with its consequent risks of injury.

Why Beginners Are at Minimal Risk of Injury

Rarely is injury in beginners tied to hard and soft tissue damage from lifting excessive resistance. There is a neuromuscular safety feature built into the human anatomy that is designed to stave off muscle contractile-related injuries in the beginner. Until nerve pathways are repeatedly called upon to stimulate muscle contractions of increasing intensity, they have impulse transmission limitations. What does this mean? It means that even if the muscles are strong enough to lift an amount of weight sufficient to cause injury, the nerve pathways cannot stimulate a strong enough contraction to move the weight. It could be stated, therefore, that the beginner's nerve pathways actually serve as an "intensity regulator". As the nerve pathways are repeatedly overloaded however, in a short time, they reach the threshold required to stimulate maximum fiber recruitment, with a contraction potential significant enough to cause injury. By this time, the beginner isn't a beginner anymore. The level of neuromuscular proficiency in part dictates contractile-related injury potential among resistance trainees.

With this in mind, as earlier mentioned, veteran resistance trainees are at greater risk of injury because their nerve pathways are capable of stimulating stronger contractions. Ever wonder why your beginning size and strength clients (all beginning resistance trainees for that matter) experience such rapid initial strength gains? Now you know it's not because they are gaining lean tissue, it is because their nerve pathways are adapting to greater workloads. Let's still stick to our guns when it comes to low beginning intensity levels, though.

The Golgi Tendon Organ

The Golgi Tendon Organ (GTO) is a sensory organ located at the musculotendonous junction (between the muscle and tendon) which responds to the amount of tension within a muscle. When a muscle is stretched or contracts, the GTO will activate at dangerous levels of muscular tension, and the nervous system will shut down the muscle in an effort to protect it from injury. You can think of a GTO as a circuit breaker which "turns off" the muscle before serious damage can occur. GTO influence will typically come into play during very heavy, high intensity sets of very few repetitions. In this case, a great number of motor units including a large percentage of fast-twitch motor units are recruited very rapidly in response to heavier weights. This in turn produces near maximum tension in the muscle from the beginning of the set. As the muscle attempts to perform more reps against the heavy resistance, the GTO reaches its threshold tension and is activated to prevent injury, and the muscle begins to shut down. End of set.

While training to "push back" the activation threshold for the GTO is possible, it in itself is an article to be published in the future. For our purposes here, the GTO probably is not a factor if you were able to perform six reps on one set and then only four on your next set, as you never reached GTO activation threshold on the second set.

Of course, a newcomer to the world of resistance exercise should be cautious not to overexert him or herself. Moreover, as a conscientious fitness professional, you certainly should be in the habit of prescribing relatively low levels of beginning resistance exercise intensity. Regardless of the implications of this piece, the prescription of low intensity exercise among beginning resistance training participants should continue to be practiced.

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