4 Ways To Keep Your Fitness While Injured

There are loads of ways you can stay fit while you’re injured so you can maintain your long term progress.

Dealing with injuries is one of the most frustrating things that can happen to an athlete, and there’s often a fear that you’ll lose everything you’ve worked for.

It’s important to keep things in perspective and remember that after recovering it’s possible to quickly get back to the level you were at before.

There are plenty of things you can do during your rehab phase to maintain what fitness you’ve got so things are easier when you can return to full training.

Here, Built for Athletes takes a look at four things you can do to stay in shape.

Low-Impact Cardio

If you find yourself unable to do your normal weight-bearing cardio exercises, there are lots of low-impact alternatives you can experiment with.

These are exercises that still enable you to get your heart rate up and achieve aerobic benefits, but without putting pressure on damaged areas.

Swimming and cycling are probably two of the most common, but you can experiment with others too, such as aqua jogging, stair walking, using a ski erg machine or even an AlterG treadmill.

Try turning your injury into an opportunity to try new things and experiment with different types of workouts.

Find Areas You Can Work On

While an injury might stop you doing the usual sessions that move you forward as an athlete, you can use the time to work on other areas of improvement.

This could still involve exercise. Your injury might not prevent you from strengthening certain areas of your body, for example.

If you work on areas of weakness that you wouldn’t normally be able to develop, you might actually be able to come back a stronger and more rounded athlete when you return to fitness.

You could also dedicate some time to improving your mindset. Psychology is an area most athletes don’t work on at all, particularly if they have a full-time job, so repurposing all the time you’ve gained could put you ahead of others.

Clean Up Your Diet

Nutrition is something that you can always improve, regardless of injuries that could be hampering you.

If you can’t work out, try reflecting on your current diet and working out what areas you might be able to improve. Keeping a food diary is a good way of doing this.

You might think your diet is pretty good as it is, but spending time reflecting might enable you to identify some small areas that can clean up.

This could help you feel more energised throughout the day and help your body recover better between sessions.

Continue To Work Towards Goals

Athletes tend to be fairly goal-oriented people. We like to have targets to work towards.

For some, the problem injury poses is by wiping out these goals and leaving them in a big state of uncertainty.

Try setting some short-term targets to motivate yourself throughout your injury lay-off. This could help you keep a structure to your day and help you maintain some good habits so you don’t lose all the fitness you’ve built up.