We do our best to stay healthy and injury free. We eat right, take our vitamins and supplements, do our warm up before we workout, drink enough water, and get enough sleep. But sometimes injuries are just unavoidable. They are a part of living an active lifestyle. Our bodies aren’t perfect. For as much as we try our best to correct any muscle imbalances and perform effective movement patterns, sometimes our tissues just get overused and cause pain. Other times we might just have an unfortunate accident playing a soccer game or pull on something too hard doing the unavoidable yardwork. The thing is…life happens!
Now the trick is what to do once injury does occur. Getting injured just plain sucks. I’m not gonna beat around the bush on this one. We all want to get back to what we were doing and not have to deal with injury or pain. Let me be the first to tell you that the adage of “no pain no gain”…DOES NOT APPLY! Instead of thinking about working THROUGH the injury let’s start thinking about working AROUND the injury.
In the first part of this series, I want to give you a few things to consider when you’re injured to help yourself stay active while healing and get back to doing what you love…TRAINING HARD!
Start with an injury self-assessment
The first thing you want to do is asses the injury. Start with thinking about how the injury occurred. Is this a new (acute) injury that just happened or an old (chronic) injury that has become more painful.
If it’s a new injury you’ll need to determine if it is something you can manage on your own. This can include rest and as well as various pain management methods such as ice, heat or anti-inflammatories. Alternatively, you may decide to see your doctor or physical therapist before you get back to modified training. Depending on the severity of injury you may be looking at getting some imaging, possible bracing and/or movement restrictions. It goes beyond the scope of this blog post to get into more detail here but just know that if there is any doubt in your mind you should stop and consult your healthcare practitioner before making any judgments on what you can or cannot do.
Chronic injuries are certainly nothing to ignore. In fact, ignoring it is likely what caused it to become more painful. I will be the first to admit that I have done my fair share of ignoring a nagging injury only for it to rear its ugly head in a big bad way later on, and always at the most inopportune time. Think about the intensity of the pain. Has it continued to get worse despite your pain management efforts (including rest!)? If the pain has progressively gotten worse and is now affecting your daily activities you likely want to have it checked out. Again, you will want to make the decision about whether to see your healthcare practitioner before you start thinking about modified return to exercise.
Taking a little bit of time now to modify your movements and training intensity to allow for healing is always the best idea. Spend some time addressing potential movement issues that could be causing the injury and therefore pain. Don’t wait until the pain becomes a bigger problem. You will end up taking MORE time off than if you had just stepped back early on to address the painful issue.
After your assessment, if you have decided not to see your healthcare practitioner for your injury, you then want to take note of what movements cause you pain. This will help give you an idea of what exercises you can still do and what you might want to stay away from. For example, if you are having trouble with overhead movements you will want to say away from doing shoulder presses. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do ANY upper body exercises though. Often times you can still perform movements that stay below 90 degrees. You can focus on shoulder stabilizers including the rotator cuff, rhomboids, lower traps, pecs, etc.
My first advice is always to let pain be your guide. If a certain movement or exercise is painful that means you need to either modify it so you don’t have pain or just stop that exercise and move on to something else.
Always focus on Recovery First!
Your primary focus is to get your body stronger, fitter and healthier for as long as possible. As I mentioned earlier, skipping recovery or trying to push through pain and get back to the gym is not the solution. You may be able to do that in the short term but trust me this will come back to haunt you in the form of chronic pain, tendinopathies, arthritis, and other nagging injuries. Ignoring or pushing through your pain will set you back further than if you just listened to your body and took the time off you needed to completely heal. You never want to do anything that will knowingly and deliberately compromise your body’s healing. We are not looking for you to push through pain!
Recovery means doing what your body needs to help you heal and be pain-free again. This could be anything from ice or heat, taking over the counter anti-inflammatory medication, seeing a massage therapist, foam rolling, rest and activity modification or sometimes a combination of these. Again, as mentioned above, see your healthcare practitioner may be a piece of the puzzle on your road to recovery.
Unfortunately, there are no quick fixes. Healing takes time. I say this as someone who has made the mistake of trying to ignore the pain and push through it. Believe me when I say this only serves to prolong the healing and recovery serving to only frustrate you more. Injuries result in a system-wide immune response that ultimately disrupts your body’s response to training and ability to tolerate stress. This is why taking the necessary time to rest and recover as well as appropriately modifying your training is so important.
Train AROUND your injury
Recovering from your injury doesn’t always mean you have to sit still. There are a lot of things you can do. The first rule is to not cause any additional pain or harm to your body so DON’T PUSH IT! We want to work AROUND your injury not THROUGH it. Do not do things that “hurt a little”…if it hurts you need to stop and move on to a movement that does NOT cause any pain. You can work on modifying your movements to work in a pain-free range. Without modification, your body will become overstressed. This will not only slow the recovery process but could lead to further injury and/or new injuries.
In addition to modifying your movements, be sure you are not setting yourself up for future injury by creating imbalances. You don’t want to spend a lot of time training one side of your body and not the other. If your left shoulder is hurt you don’t want to spend a long time working just your right arm. This will create imbalances throughout your body including your back, hips, and legs. All of them can be affected by this consistent unilateral movement you have been doing. Doing one sides movements is not necessarily a bad thing. It can actually be very functional, considering we do many movements in our day one-sided. You can and should still train the healthy side but you also want to try to find movements what works both sides in a pain-free range.
The above-mentioned considerations are never meant to replace the advice of your healthcare practitioner. As I stated above if you have any concerns about your injury your first stop should be your doctor or physical therapist. However, I want you to recover while also not being afraid to continue training with modifications as able.
In part two of this series, I will be going into more detail on how exactly you can train AROUND your injury. I’ll be sharing some helpful tips and suggestions on HOW and WHAT you can train without causing more harm than good.
Until next time…
Xx
Allison
