When you sustain an injury, the first thing you’re told to do is rest. While resting is part of the healing process, you will want to maintain your fitness as best as you can when recovering. For some people, it’s hard enough to keep motivated to work out. Having a fitness routine is important to help you stay in shape, but when you’re injured you have to take some time off to ensure you give your body time to recover properly to avoid causing further damage to the injury.
If you have sustained an injury by overexerting yourself at the gym or through a workout, you should consider physiotherapy. Chances are you will still want to maintain your fitness levels during this time. When you’ve injured one part of your body, there’s no reason why you can’t still work out and try something new. Keep reading to find out how you can maintain your fitness when recovering from an injury.
Back injury
One of the hardest injuries to recover from is a back injury, so it’s important to speak to a doctor or physical therapist before you do any physical activity. Exercise can help lower back pain, and swimming, walking, and recumbent cycling are all good for maintaining your cardio fitness. When done properly, lifting weights can help chronic back pain. Avoid exercise that may aggravate the pain, like sit-ups, toe touches, and leg lifts. Hamstring stretches, pelvic tilts, and bridging can be helpful.
Shoulder injury
Shoulder injuries are quite common, and there are some moves you can do to ease the pain, like using a resistance band to help strengthen the rotator cuff muscles. With a shoulder injury, you are likely to be able to carry on with cardio exercises as your lower body isn’t affected. Exercise like walking, cycling and jogging can all help. Some circuit training routines may help strengthen non-injured muscles and joints, like walking lunges, ab crunches, leg presses, and wall sits.
Foot injury
With a foot injury, there are plenty of exercise options that you can still do. You can do some cardio exercises with a foot injury, like swimming which can help take the weight off your foot. Try to do the freestyle stroke as this will limit the need to kick your feet, keeping them relaxed. Weight lifting workouts are also great when you have a foot injury. By doing upper body exercises like a bench press or lat pulldown will be beneficial as there’s no pressure being put on your foot.
Knee injury
If you have a knee injury it can be very limiting as a lot of exercises require the knee to be flexible. You could try using an upper-body ergometer, or try some gentle stretches to help ease the pain like a hamstring stretch. Leg extensions and side leg raises can help strengthen your knees by focusing on the muscles around them.
Taking weeks or months off from your usual exercise regimen can be discouraging but there are ways you can maintain your fitness levels, and hopefully, the above exercises can provide some encouragement.
