Thursday, 31 January 2013

Recovering From Inury

Stress fractures, many athletes worst nightmare, including me, and by far the worst part of being injured (for me anyway) is having to rest. You lie there constantly thinking about how your loosing your fitness, wasting away and getting bored out of your skull! 

Well unfortunately I've found that rest is the only way to go if you want any chance of healing up properly, but what I found this time was that there are other low impact and just as fun (nearly) activities such as cycling, swimming, cross fit circuits etc that allow you to keep up the fitness and strengthen that weakened injury zone. 

By keeping active I have found that the body doesn't become stiff and restricted. For example, after 5 weeks of pure rest and recovery, I began a form of cross fit style circuits in the gym including squats, pull ups, weights work etc. these allowed my body to exercise without placing too much stress and impact upon the injury zone within my foot. By performing these exercises on Bosu Balls http://www.bosu.com/scripts/cgiip.exe/WService=BOSU/story.html and other balance and core training devices, I found that my weakened foot had to work hard but wasn't placed under any impact.

I then began to graduate to cardio-vascular (CV) work on the bike and in the pool. A mixture of upper and lower body work in the gym, combined with CV work in the pool and on the bike allowed my foot to strengthen up without stiffening and becoming too weak as well as re developing my CV endurance ready to get back to running again.

Here's a few great articles on how to get back to running after injury: 
Also, here's a few pieces of home equipment that I found to be brilliant during those dull days where CV and load bearing exercise wasn't allowed!!

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