Working Around Injuries 62/84

So picture this; you're out at the lake on the weekend, enjoying the outdoor activities when you crash off of your jetski and sprain your wrist. It doesn't hurt too bad but I kind of ruins your weekend. You get to the gym on Monday and realize that the injury is way worse than you thought and you can barely use that hand at all. You've been putting in great time at the gym and you don't want to lose everything you've been working on. So what do you do? Take a break? Work around it? Work through it? Let's talk about it.

Depending on the severity of the injury, there's almost always a way for you to continue hitting the gym and making gains without having to lay on the couch and get fat. Pretty much any extremity injury can be worked around, that is most any injury to an arm or a leg. If that's what you're dealing with then, to be frank, it's not an excuse to skip the gym. You may not be able to do some of your favorite exercises but you can still work on other things. The basic rule for this is "if it hurts, don't do it". Avoid things that hurt and do pretty much anything that doesn't. We'll take my recent hamstring injury as an example. A couple Tuesday's ago a had a pretty minor high hamstring pull while playing sand volleyball. I finished the match but knew that it was going to be a bit sore. I also knew that a lot of my normal leg day activities would have to be put on hold. Did I use this as an excuse to skip the gym? Hell no! I just did what I could. I already do two upper body days so those stayed almost exactly the same, then when leg day came I just did things that didn't hurt. The only real pain I got was from hip hinge exercises like deadlifts and RDL's. This left light squatting, and things for my calves, adductors, and abductors, as well as isolation exercises like leg extensions. Was it ideal? No. Is it better than nothing? Of course. Moral is, don't use an extremity injury as an excuse to be lazy.

Now, obviously, there are some exceptions. Back injuries are nothing to mess with. Neither are neck injuries. If it hurts to move, probably don't go exercise. Just follow the same rule "if it hurts, don't do it". In these cases, do whatever you need to do to get well as fast as you can so you can get back to being healthy and getting exercise. Don't do anything stupid to make things worse.

On the topic of injuries, I am not a fan of ice. This is a completely different conversation but I just want to get this out there. Kelly Starett has a couple great videos that can probably explain this a bit better then I can but the basics are that our bodies have developed, over thousands of years, a way to heal ourselves and we're silly to think we can make much of a difference. Also, ice may actually increase the amount time to takes to heal from an injury due to backflow of some of the "garbage" you're body is trying to remove.

Along the same lines, I am a fan of ice baths and, obviously, chryotherapy but that is a much different story than simply putting an ice bag on a sprained ankle in a futile attempt to heal.

Everything here comes down to this; unless your injury prevents you from moving without a ton of pain, you should still be doing whatever you can, without pain, to continue making progress in the gym and keeping your health up as high as you can.