The Benefits of Cross Training
Written by Dionne Tey
Cross Training engages a variety of activities with compromise on advantages and shortcomings of each activity. Cross training has shown to improve overall sports performance and injury prevention. For example, people who like jogging can alternate their training by cycling to prevent overuse injuries yet reaping cardiovascular benefits. Cross training should be individualized based on goal specificity. Besides that, cross training has other benefits as well
- Improve overall fitness - we can incorporate all fitness components into our training session including aerobic, anaerobic cardiovascular fitness, muscular strength and endurance, flexibility rather than just do one type of exercise.
- Injury Prevention - We know that injuries can be caused by inadequate recovery, muscle fatigue, muscle imbalance, faulty biomechanics. Cross training can help to vary the exercise selections. We can alternate low impact and high impact exercise or doing exercises that involve different muscle group to prevent overuse injuries.
- Rehabilitation – to prevent detraining or relapse happening, we can continue exercising by performing other type of exercises that do not involve the injured body part. For example, we perform upper body exercise when we are recovering from a lower body injury.
- Mental breaks and motivation- People might feel bored when they perform repetitive mode of exercise. So, cross training will break the boredom with a variety of activities.
- Plateau Prevention – After exercising for a period of time, some might face little or no improvement. Cross training can help to break the plateaus of exercise progression hence new improvement can be seen.
About the Author
Dionne earns a Bachelor of Sport Science Degree, majoring in Exercise Physiology, University of Malaya (Dean’s List) and also holds a 2nd Dan black belt in Tae Kwon Do. She has a pending American Council on Exercise (ACE) Personal Trainer Certification.
