I think, today is a good day to tell you about a subject that is not most pleasant, but quite important, as all people involved in fitness or sports somehow face this problem. I’m talking about injuries and illnesses.
Let’s start from the most important thing – absolutely (!) everyone gets injured. Injuries are the constant companion of strength training (and, indeed, any kind of it). It’s no matter how long you have been training, what your current level is and how attentive and responsible your training approach is (although, this reduces the risk of being injured), anyway you may receive the injury. You just have to accept it.
The number one rule
We never do something that causes pain. NEVER. You shouldn’t endure pain, you don’t need to do something through pain. If something is beginning to pain, you have to stop doing this IMMEDIATELY.</quote>
If you don’t want to get a serious problems – don’t do anything through pain! I must mention that I’m talking about the ‘bad’ pain (when you have pain in your ligaments/joints, or somewhere else, where you shouldn’t have pain) and not about the ‘good’ pain (when you have pain in your muscles). Although, in the second case, it’s also needed to learn to listen to your organism and understand, whether you can train or not.
After you stopped doing what causes pain, you should analyze your feelings and find the source of this pain, to understand why it appeared and what to do with it. It’s all very simple.
Injuries: big and small ones
There are different kinds of injuries and the most important thing to do is to understand, how serious is your injure. If the problem is not very serious (e.g. sprain), so recovery may take a few days or a week, if it’s something more
serious (e.g. dislocation), so recovery may take a few week, the more serious is the injury, the more time will take the recovery.
Anyway, there are several more rules that allow you to recover after an injury a bit quicker:
* Provide rest and quiet. Do not unnecessarily load the injured part of your body. The quieter, the better.
* Use anesthetic gels. Actually, injuries in workout is a comparatively rare thing, but as for the most common, those, surely, are sprain and inflammation. Anesthetic gels contain the active component, which helps to remove inflammation. This may not only reduce pain, but sometimes remove its reason. Anyway, it’s very helpful thing, use it, it will do you good.
* Use wraps. There are such things as wraps. There are wrist, elbow, shoulder, knee wraps etc. Those are destined for giving an additional fixation to a joint, by limiting its mobility and reducing the load on a joint itself as well as on muscles/ligaments surrounding it. Wraps may be useful if you really want to train very much (or it’s strongly needed).
The proper attitude
Nobody likes getting injures, but if you can’t avoid them, so, in the end, it all depends on your attitude to them. I know that such situation can unsettle you, that you don’t want to leave the track and take a break.
First, depending on injury, you can modify your workout routine, so that you can keep training without loading of your injured body parts. For example, if you sprain you wrist, well, you may dedicate a few next trainings to the lower half of your body. Well, imagine that you slipped (taking into account the quality of snow removal here, it’s no wonder), fell and knocked your knee, okay, train upper half of your body in the near future. This list can be much longer, as all variants are limited only by your imagination. But the main idea is – let injured parts to recover.
Second, trainings and workout are only a piece of our life, surely cool and important, but only a piece. There are an infinite number of interesting things in the world, which you can do, while you can’t train. Recovery can be used to do such things that you don’t have time to do due to the very busy schedule (because when you are ill, usually there is a lot of free time). You can master some useful computer program, read an interesting book, learn to play on some musical instrument, think of something, introspect about your past and make plans for the future! There are always a lot of variants, and the only thing you need is to stop thinking that you can’t train now, and start thinking about what you can do now!
100-day workout – Contents
