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

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