How to Overcome the Challenges of Working Out Around Injuries

For those who like to train hard and consistently, an injury, whether minor or serious, can disrupt not only your training life, but your life in general. Working around these injuries obviously depends greatly on the type of injury, and there is a fine line between being mentally tough and stupid when continuing to train.

Here are some suggestions on working around many of the common injuries seen within the military, dependent on the injury location and severity, of course:

Overcoming Running Problems or Lower-Body Injuries

Many injuries can create this dilemma within the military population. From toes, feet, ankles, shins, knees, hips and lower back to broken bones, pulled muscles and tendinitis, there are dozens of reasons why people must find non-impact options besides running due to injury.

Joint Pain

You may or may not be able to get on bikes, stair steppers, a rowing machine or even swim, but an elliptical machine may be a good option for the short term while you heal. As your joints start to heal and you can progress slowly back into running again, you should add in some more non-impact cardio options to fill the previous time you spent running.

Muscle or Bone Pain

You may need to focus on more upper-body cardio like swimming and dragging your legs, versus kicking. However, with stress fractures, the goal during recovery is to avoid the impact of running or rucking. You can replace all cardio with several options of bike, rowing, elliptical and/or swimming workouts.

Skipping Leg Day

Many running injuries also prevent us from doing leg calisthenics or lifting exercises, but there are some that will not make you skip leg day. A common-sense approach is critical to healing properly. If any exercise or movement hurts the muscle, joints or bones of the lower extremities, you must rest and recover without fitting in a leg day to your week.

Even if you must skip leg day, you may be clear to do upper-body days at the same intensity as before. Between that and some non-impact cardio, you may not have issues with calorie surpluses and weight gain due to injury inactivity.

Building Back with a Triathlon Approach

Two-thirds of the triathlete's workouts (biking and swimming) are non-impact cardio. Consider this approach when building back your cardio base after an injury that had you sidelined for several weeks or more.

If you were used to running an hour for workouts prior to your injury, make two-thirds of that time (40 minutes) focused on bike or swimming. Then build back up to 20-plus minutes of running week after week at a logical progression of 10%-15% per week.

Overcoming Upper-Body Injuries

From the lower back to the neck, shoulders, elbows, wrists, hands and fingers, the types of injuries that prevent many from doing your favorite upper-body workouts are many. Broken bones and dislocated joints obviously will differ from pulled muscles and sprains, but all typically will cause you to skip calisthenics, dumbbells, barbells and other resistance training.

Some machines may offer the ability to work some upper-body muscles by isolating them from the injured area. You may not have to skip leg day, depending on the location of the upper-body injury.

Watch Your Food Intake During Injury Periods

When you cannot do anything due to injuries like a broken rib, spinal injury or a serious surgery, the habit of eating an extra 500-1,000 calories per day to maintain your body weight when training hard will have to be altered, or you can quickly gain weight.

This added weight could put you in jeopardy, not only with the height and weight standards of the military, but also your future performance. You will now have to include weight loss into your training, which will seriously limit your ability to recover and perform well again at running and calisthenics as quickly. Watch both ends of the calories-in/calories-out equation when your activity is greatly limited by injury.

Stew Smith is a former Navy SEAL and fitness author certified as a Strength and Conditioning Specialist (CSCS) with the National Strength and Conditioning Association. Visit his Fitness eBook store if you're looking to start a workout program to create a healthy lifestyle. Send your fitness questions to stew@stewsmith.com.

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