Getting Back After An Injury

If you’ve had the unfortunate occurrence of suffering from an injury during your workout program and have just gone through weeks of rehabilitation to get yourself back up to speed, you’re likely antsy to get back into the gym and put forth some good workouts again.

But, you need to be very careful with how you proceed right now because if you’re not careful, you could find yourself sidelined yet again very shortly.

Many people rush back into their training, expecting to progress right back to their former level that they were working out with before the injury took place.

You must remember that with any amount of extended time off, slight detraining will have occurred and your workouts will need to be adapted as such.

Let’s have a look at a few of the main steps to take when you’re coming back from an injury.

Always Go Slow

The very first thing that you must do is to make sure that you get back into it slowly.  Don’t dive in and try and do an hour the first day.  Start with 15 minutes and work your way up from there.

If you are starting back relatively slowly, you’ll find that after the first few sessions, you can increase the intensity rather quickly to get back to where you were.

But you do need those first few initial sessions where you allow your body time to get back acquainted with exercise again.

Don’t Stop Your Strength Building Injuries

Next, also make sure that you don’t stop performing any of the strengthening exercises you were doing to get past the injury in the first place.

Keep up all those exercises as they will continue to strengthen the weak muscles around the point where you were injured, reducing the chances that it happens again.

It would be a smart move to continue on with these exercises for at least another 3-5 weeks after you are back into your training to prevent the risk of injuries developing once again.

Be Particular About Form

Third, also make sure that you are very anal about using good form.  If your injury occurred because you were using improper form, now is not the time to let yourself fall back into old habits.

Start at a lower intensity level and make sure that your form is 100% spot on.  Now is the time to develop better form habits so that you can get rid of whatever it was that caused you to become injured initially.

Don’t go to any higher intensity level until you are fully confident you will maintain good form.

Consider Cross Training

Finally, last but not least, consider cross training when you first get back into it.  Rather than spending all your sessions on the machine that caused the injury, add a few others into the mix.  This will help you regain your fitness level faster without risking re-injury.

Do two sessions per week on your ‘favorite’ machine – where you were injured and make up the rest with other modes of exercise.

So if you ever find yourself coming back after injury, keep these tips in mind.  This way you can be sure that you are on to further progress and not further pain.