Having a fitness schedule not only helps you stay in shape, but it can also help you feel good. But sometimes, something can go wrong and you end up getting an injury. When that happens, you’ll deal with physical pain as well as the emotional upset.
You might experience sadness, and even struggle a bit with situational depression because of not being able to do what you were able to do before. If you get sidelined with an injury, that doesn’t mean that you can’t be active at all.
It just means you need to readjust your workout and do things a little differently. The worst thing that you can do is to keep on trying to push through and worsen an injury. It’ll take twice as long if you do that and you can end up with damage to muscles, joints or bones that require invasive treatment.
While some pain is normal with fitness, you know when you’ve injured yourself because it doesn’t feel normal. The part of you that’s injured must go into a fitness time out so that it can heal.
You may have injured your upper body. That doesn’t mean that you can’t work on the lower part of your body. Or you may have injured a shoulder. That doesn’t mean that you can’t walk on the treadmill or go for a run.
What you can do is look for modified fitness routines for whatever part of your body that you’ve injured. While it’s okay to exercise while you’re injured, it’s never okay to experience extreme pain or difficulty moving a part of your body.
You’ll still be able to work out on your schedule, but you just have to make sure that your routine has exercises that avoid the muscles in the part that’s hurt. Sometimes, all it takes for an exercise injury to heal is just time and rest.
If you protect the area by not injuring it further, then you’ll be back on track quicker. If you injure your knee joint, don’t do any exercise that stresses that joint – no lunges, no cycling, no running, etc.
What you can do instead is focus on exercises that build your abdominal muscles, tighten up your core or strengthen your arm muscles. You can also lower the amount of strain that you experience when working out so that your body doesn’t have to deal with as great of an impact.
To do this, you would cut high intensity, high impact exercises out for the time being. You would replace these exercises with ones that are low impact only. This would be something like swimming or walking, depending on your injury. Keep in mind that most fitness injuries are a result of working out too long, not warming up or cooling down, improper training, trying to go to fast or muscle overuse.
