Wednesday Sep 20, 2023

49. Top Five Tips for Healing From an Exercise-Related Injury

Are you recovering from an injury and eager to get back to doing what you love? You CAN regain your confidence and safely resume the activities you love after an injury - but there are some concepts to consider. Healing requires thoughtful and intentional planning and care as your body heals.

Tara shares from her experience and training some things to consider if you’re on the mend from an exercise-related injury - and Elizabeth talks about living through this in real life and in real time!

Some useful general principles that Tara discusses in this conversation:

To stretch or not to stretch? You can’t hurt it by NOT stretching it, but you could do damage if it’s something that’s overstretched.
Try not to get discouraged!
Cold prevents swelling, and swelling inhibits healing. | Warm will always feel better, but it may not bring healing. Strain your back? Go ahead and try to relax everything with a warm, Epsom salt bath.

Then she gives us five important tips to help you heal from exercise-related injuries: (These are just a few thoughts, listen to the episode for more info…)

Give it a few days. But also talk to your doctor and get them involved so they can assess and give you a game plan.
Take it easy and don’t rush back into exercise. A general guideline is that your recovery time should be twice as long as the time your injury kept you out of commission. (So if you’re out of commission for 5 days, ease back into your exercise program over the next 10 days once you get started again.)
When you do come back to exercise, start with small goals.
Don’t ignore your pain. Listen to your body! The guideline for this is if you feel a slow-onset burning pain, it’s probably ok. If you get acute-onset stabbing pain, DON’T continue with whatever you’re doing.
Get back to what you love once you’re ready! Getting hurt doesn’t mean that you should quit altogether.

Be creative! Just because you’ve injured one area of your body doesn’t mean you can’t work the rest of it. Research has shown that working on the able side of your body with actually strengthen the injured side!

- Tara De Leon

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