I'm injured? Now what? How to exercise and heal when injured.

Oct 3, 2022

9 min read

If you're reading this, you or your client must have recently got injured. Regardless of whether it was:

• during the day, doing something like picking up a pencil or something equally unremarkable,
• tripping over a step that had a severe impact to the back or knee,
• doing something relatively straightforward in the gym, (or perhaps a little bit complex),

there's no easy way to say this. Training and exercising when you have an injury does suck. Some of the best things you can do:

Let yourself heal.

Make sure that you maintain a certain degree of fitness, so that you have less work to do when you head back to the gym again.

Maintain a good level of functions that you can actually do things in your day to day.

Pull back just a little bit so that you're able to have enough left in the tank to be able to recover from your injury depending on the nature of it.

Within our programs, there's a number of exercise programs that we've created for you if you have injured yourself.

One of them is Pre-made workouts. If you're self sufficient and you just want to be pointed in the right direction, or if you're just really not sure and you want to talk to someone. We also have coaches that can write a really specialized program, especially if the nature of your injury seems to be a little bit more complex than your everyday kind of run of the mill thing or you have a couple of niggles that may be inhibiting you from reaching your best.

For instance, if you have recently had a shoulder injury, you're just getting back into it and now you seem to have done something to your hip. You know, things do happen in clusters, so don't blame yourself for that. But if you do have a few things going on at once and you want to be pointed in the right direction, or you would like a more specialized approach, just reach out to us and we can point you in the right direction for that.

To prevent an injury in the first place, one of the best things you can do is stay active. When we remain active, we're less at risk of falling. We also have more chance of being able to “save” ourselves when we are put in an unexpected scenario.

Here are some other injury prevention ideas:

maintain a certain level of fitness and only incrementally increase that as you go.

Make sure that you warm up really well in the first place. A warm up should be about maybe a 10th of your workout. I like to look at about five or six minutes dedicated to just warming up especially when it's winter in Melbourne or wherever you are in the world. First of all, you need to get your head in the right headspace for working out but on top of that you just need to get more warmth through the muscles, more circulation and prime the central nervous system for what you're about to do, es

On top of that, core warm ups are crucial. Bird dogs are one of my favorites. So are planks, get the transverse abdominals working, maybe some dead bugs and some side planks just so that you're getting that core warmed up and doing two sets of that so it's not taking it to failure. It's just literally just getting the muscle motor units primed and ready to start. There's many studies out there that have shown that during the warmup before your workout can help prevent injuries. One of the ways t

Now, before we get on to the next bit which is about training around the injury day, make sure that you've booked in to see a professional about the injury, especially if it's something that you haven't experienced before or it happened in an acute way or an accident or that sort of thing. Your physiotherapist or your GP will test a whole range of movements and they'll rule out things that are particularly dangerous or concerning. That may be extremely unlikely but it just gives everybody a peac

so one way to proceed after you've been ruled out from anything that's more concerning than a simple muscle strain or tear or like sprained ankle or something like that is start to work before you can run. So do some of the movements as like a little bit of a test with no weight. See if you can for instance if your shoulder feels funny, see if you can reach above your head or just see what like movements that you actually couldn't potentially do. Sometimes people think that they'll be able to wo

During your recovery regime,

1.you want to prioritize sleep. I'd like to get one extra hour of sleep when I start a new regime or when I'm injured. So if I usually go for eight hours a night I'll try and get nine hours a night until I'm completely better again because there's some extra work to be done for the body when you're completely at rest.

2.Nutrition shouldn't be overlooked. If you're in a calorie deficit, you actually don't have enough extra energy for your body to go ahead and heal things. Sometimes you can prolong an injury that way so we want to make sure that there's enough energy to maintain if not a surplus to get you healthier faster because if you are uninjured, you'll be able to do a greater intensity than if you just remain injured and are in your calorie deficit because you don't want to put on white.

3.One of the most important things you can do for your mood but also for getting back into it post-injury is making sure that you stay active. Even if that's just for walks, like try everything that could potentially be done.If you feel like you're quite a novice in these things, they can reach out to us because we can get really quite creative around injuries and in fact the person who started all of this movement, and this website is particularly injury prone, she's quite uncoordinated. So she

4.Another one that you can think of say you've injured your foot or your ankle, even though it may not be your favorite thing to do, is get really creative. Sometimes it just takes you to think outside the box to get you into a better place like I injured my foot. I realized I couldn't really walk, I couldn't really squat and I could only do some limited upper body stuff because everything required me to be standing up. So I was only able to do seated upper body exercises or abdominals if I didn

We all go through injuries and they're usually set to test us and we come out the other side feeling a little bit more robust. A common reaction to injuries is to desire to catastrophize them, believing that they will bring about the end of the world, that everyone else will avoid becoming hurt, and other such things. But it actually happens a lot more frequently than you realize. You're more likely to get injured if you're actually moving your body. So I mean that's a good trade off, instead of

Now if you are facing an injury, do you remember that injuries do not heal in a linear fashion so it's not like the injury is the worst when you first do it and then incrementally over time. It gets lesser and lesser until it's all gone. We need to throw out that idea that in six weeks any injury can heal because that's just like terms that are just thrown around like in six weeks, everything will be fine. No, Injuries are not fine after six weeks. They usually are at the point where it doesn't

So, if you need any help just reach out! We're more than happy to help you and we do agree getting injured gets really sucky. It can make you more crabby as well. But guess what, we've all gone through it and we'd love to help you stay injury free and get out of this injury.