You spend enough time exercising to chase your goals down, but you’re probably missing out on a key part of the puzzle.
How much time do you spend busting your ass chasing results? Now, how often do you spend preparing your body for long-term health?
The answer? Probably not much.
This post is going to be all about prehab and how you can give yourself (and your body) the best chance for performance and longevity!
What is Prehab?
It’s a combination of Pre (before) and rehab. Pretty clever right?
It’s exactly what it sounds like: a set of exercises and techniques designed to prevent injury and improve joint health. It’s about dealing with injuries before they happen, rather than having to rehab your busted joints after the fact!
Nothing hurts your long-term progress like getting injured. Time off is always worse than taking it easy – investing your time into prehab now means a much better quality of life down the road. It also means you’re not spending time recovering and missing out on those sweet results you’re working hard for.
Whether your goals are performance or health, being pain-free and moving better will always be a key factor. We’re going to take you through how it works and how to do it – including the best exercises for prehab.
Joint and Muscle Injuries: Who Needs Prehab?
The simple answer is that everyone needs prehab. With the modern life of sedentary living, driving, sitting and all the convenience, prehab will prove vital for everyone.
The modern lifestyle contributes to serious joint and muscle problems.
Prehab is the remedy.
Remember to warmup and cool down, too! Learn how to use static and dynamic stretching before and after exercising.
Prehab For Hard-Working Bodies
You already know athletes must take care of their bodies. Whether they’re hardcore exercise enthusiasts or professional athletes, they put their bodies under huge stress. If this is you, you already know the aches, pains, and risk of injury that comes with hard work.
If it’s not you, you can skip ahead – or you can learn all about why athletes need Prehab!
Prehab for the hardcore is all about keeping up performance and recovery for the short- and long-term. It’s about making sure that you can train day-in, day-out in a way that doesn’t grind you into the floor. It’s an investment for maximum performance.
With the amount of loading and joint-stress that you see as an athlete, you need to help balance it out and keep yourself healthy. You won’t reach the pinnacle of sport if you’re benched with an injury – if you’re already on a full-time training schedule then you have no excuse not to prioritise prehab.
If you can find the time to train for hours at a time, 10-30 minutes of prehab a few times a week is going to bring you excellent results.
This is even more true since most athletes will see more benefit from better recovery than from extra training. Put the time in for injury prevention – it’s not glamorous, but neither is a career-ending injury. Think about it.
Prehab also aims at improving muscle balance on a joint and overall movement quality. This isn’t trivial – it’s how you develop your technique. Many of the exercises we’re going to talk about today help strengthen the muscles and improve your control over your body. This means better performance in areas of training you didn’t even expect.
For example, weighted dislocates and wall slides are going to help you improve your scapular control and, as a result, pull-ups. There’s a serious butterfly-effect caused by prehab and movement quality training. You might not see the benefits straight away, but be patient and they’ll become widespread throughout your performance.
For the Average Joe
So, what can prehab do for you if you’re not an Olympian that loves the struggle of dozens of hours training every week?
Prehab can improve your life.
Joint health is a huge problem for quality of life. Growing old is going to happen either way, but you can make it easier and healthier with prehab. Think about how many knee, hip, shoulder and back problems there are in the elderly. Strengthening the muscles around those joints and learning to control them are essential to keeping healthy.
So, whether you’re aiming to perform at the top of the world or simply to walk pain-free for longer, you’ll see perks. Plus, prehabbing is exercise that’s going to strengthen and grow muscles that you don’t normally deal with. This means looking, moving, and feeling better.
Posture is another crucial reason you might need to use prehab. Injury prevention involves a large amount of posture-fixing to improve your overall wellness. This doesn’t just mean reduced risk of joint injury (which is already awesome!) – it also brings with it looking and feeling better, while being more likeable and attractive.
When Should you Prehab? What is Prehab FOR?
Before you get hurt.
Okay, so it’s a little more complicated than that. Prehab is good for anyone who is healthy. If you’re injured, you should probably avoid a lot of these movements as they tend to strengthen and stretch you in ranges that challenge your mobility and control.
We’re going to outline when prehab is appropriate and why it’s useful.
Posture
We mentioned it a bit above, but posture is a key part of how you should design and implement your training plan. It’s a big player in joint health, how people perceive you, and the risk of long-term injury.
The exercises in this article are selected because they combat postural problems like slumping, forward-head posture and even hip-spine dysfunction. If you want (or need) better posture, prehab is for you.
Balancing Muscle Demands
Muscles are attached to joints and tight or weak muscles imbalance those joints. If your quads are tight, but your core is weak, you’re going to place undue stress on your spine and increase your injury risk.
Prehab exercises are designed to deal with this, balancing out the muscles and keeping your joints healthy. This means less possibility, again, of long-term injury, frailty or joint dysfunction. This is as valuable as any amount of weight loss or muscle-building!
Rehab+: Better than Normal
If you’ve already experienced pain and injury in a joint or muscle, prehab sounds like a counter-intuitive thought. It’s about preparing yourself before injury, right?
Well, prehab is even more useful for regaining control and strengthening weak areas after an injury. Once you are pain-free and back to normal, prehab is a good way of bullet-proofing yourself against future injury.
If you’re just coming off of an injury, you know how awful it is, and you probably want to avoid any future incidences. The point of prehab is to make this happen and protect you from the underlying cause that hurt you in the first place.
Movement Quality
The way that you move is intimately linked to the balance across your joints and the strength/control you have in different muscles. Developing both of these is an easy way to improve your overall wellbeing and gain better control of your own body/movement.
Movement is at the heart of every type of exercise and performance training – whatever your goals are, you’re going to benefit from moving better, and prehab does exactly that. Learn to control your joints better, strengthen the muscles and prepare the joints.
If you’re worrying about performance or health, you have to come back to movement. You might not have paid attention to it outside of exercise, but prehab is a great way to start improving it and actively caring about movement quality.
Performance
Performance is key. We’ve already mentioned how joint health and muscle control and even movement quality are improved by prehab. Performance is the culmination of all of these – you add these up, and you’re fundamentally a better athlete.
You’re also going to be able to direct prehab at your specific sport needs and work it into your S&C protocol. It’s more than just bullet-proofing your body – it’s a chance to strengthen the positions and requirements of your sport.
Core prehab is the best example. We’ve covered core training extensively in the past, but it’s also a great place for improving performance. Train for any run/sprint-based sport? Rotational core prehab is going to be amazing for strength, power, transferring force and improving your mechanics.
In a field sport like soccer or rugby? Prehab for the knee and hip should involve a lot of non-sagittal movement (that’s the type of forward/backward or up/down movement most people train) to improve your change of direction and speed.
The application for your sport and goals depends on what they are – the exercises below are a good foundation, but they’re also general. They provide a great foundation (especially for the recreational fitness enthusiast), but if you’re looking for maximum performance, you’ll want to adapt them to your own needs.
The Best Prehab Exercises
These are our favourite basic prehab exercises. If you’re just here to get fitter and healthier, it’s the perfect general routine. Try this a few times a week, and you’ll start seeing benefits quickly – but you’ll also see less injuries.
Rear Delts
Face Pull
This is a great exercise for recruiting the rear delts and integrating them into the movement of the shoulder blades. It teaches shoulder retraction and proper movement, all while strengthening these under-used muscles.
The rowing mechanic of a face pull is super interesting too – it’s about locking the shoulder girdle back and down during the movement. This is a crucial part of other exercises like pull-ups and deadlifts, so it’s going to have far-reaching benefits.
Reverse Flye
This is similar to the face pull – it develops strength, control, and proper patterning through the rear delts and scap – but it does it without the rowing action.
The reverse flye is a great, lightweight exercise for pure scap retraction. It builds on the face pull and makes for a great superset!
Scap control
Swimmers’ Hold
These are all about tightness and control. Super useful if you’re working on posture and control of the upper back. You’re going to see much greater benefits in other exercises from this control.
An easy enough exercise and a great part of any warm-up, the swimmers’ hold is a simple exercise for improving your control and proprioception. This is a great way of building stability – something that many people struggle with during loaded exercises like squats and deadlifts.
Wall Slide
These are underrated, awful, and amazingly effective! They improve your shoulder stability in underused muscles like the serratus. This little muscle on the sides of your chest is amazing for shoulder health and strength in the bench press.
These are another great warm-up exercise that you can perform inside the gym or the comfort of your own home with nothing more than a wall!
Shoulder (Weighted) Dislocates
These are our overall-favourite exercises for the shoulders. They provide strength, stability, control and even improve joint health. They’re a great way of improving your health and performance: you need to be doing them!
The shoulders have the greatest overall range of any joint in the body, and they require more stability work as a result. You need to practice control here, and you’re going to see less postural problems and shoulder injuries/impingement.
Core
Deadbug
An amazing exercise for core control and anti-rotation strength, the deadbug is underrated. We love it because it’s an easy way to improve some of the most common dysfunctions.
Poor core control can lead to imbalances in the body, leaning on one side of your body, and reduced performance. The deadbug combats all of these. It reduces your injury risk, keeps your spine safe, and strengthens the muscles involved with everything from walking to throwing.
Plank
Stability is key for your core. That’s why it exists – to keep the spine neutral and safe. The plank does this, but the way that it’s usually performed sucks.
The 8-point-plank is a great way of forcing yourself to improve your stability by making it more difficult for yourself. You’re not going to make progress doing the same low-effort plank for minutes. Put hard work in, you’re going to need it to build the muscle and control.
Weighted planks are okay, but loading isn’t the best way to improve your core stability. Destabilising yourself and making the leverage more difficult to control, however, is – it’s how you’re going to encounter challenges to your spine stability in sport and real life.
Hips
Roller Squeeze (esp. athletes)
The roller squeeze is an adductor exercise that’s going to really force you to use some under-used muscles. If you’re an athlete in strength sports, it’s quite possible you’re going to have under-developed internal rotation strength and control.
You can have massive, powerful glutes but if you can’t control your internal rotation, you’re going to catch an injury. I’d know – I’ve done it. Internal rotation doesn’t get as much attention, but it’s crucial to keeping yourself healthy and developing the most effective movement pattern.
This should be an essential part of your hip prehab. It’s going to be more useful for athletes, but it’s important for everyone. Of course, make sure to train both sides of any joint or movement pattern.
Clam and Frog Pump
Clams and other forms of external rotation are an important way of improving your hip control. They’re glute and external rotation exercises – essential for controlling your lower body, stabilising your spine and countering the Roller Squeeze’s internal rotation.
Training both sides is essential, but for the general population of fitness enthusiasts, the glutes are more important. Lower back problems are closely linked to weakness in the glutes and other muscles that the clam improves. It’s also a super easy exercise to start on so you can scale your training to your abilities.
Crab Walk
This is a great exercise for turning on all the muscles involved in the squat. If you keep your knees slightly bent and take a single step at a time, it’ll work everything from the core and hips to the stabilisers of the knee.
The crab walk is often performed wrong, so pay attention to your technique. It’s going to be a great way of forcing you into stability and effective movement in ways that you never really practice. This is the point of prehab: to strengthen you in challenging and unusual ways.
3D Knee Stability
This is a bit more complicated. It’s a series of band-resistance exercises that is going to stabilise your knee and hip in every plane and direction. You can find a demonstration/explanation here, but the important part is that you focus on stability and actively staying still.
These exercises are amazing for your overall wellbeing as they train you to hold a neutral hip position. You’re going to see greater hip health: no matter your goals or individual muscular balances, having a strong neutral position is key.
With the hip being directly connected to the knee and the spine, it plays a central role in your performance and health. Dysfunction in the hip is going to result in sub-optimal performance and increased injury risk in these two essential, at-risk joints.
Closing Remarks
Prehab is the perfect example of preparing for success. It’s an investment of your time to save yourself time, effort and pain in the future. This is why you train anyway – to be better in the future. If you can convince yourself to spend a small amount of time doing this sort of exercise, you’re going to see huge benefits whether you’re chasing a gold medal or just playing with your kids.
Being prepared ahead of time is the best way to deal with life. You might get injured someday, but getting yourself healthy and resilient means less, gentler injuries in the future.
Put the time in now, and you’ll be far healthier and happier for the rest of your life!
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