How to Return to Exercise After Being Sidelined With an Injury

You’ve finally found a fitness routine that feels great, body and mind. You’re staying consistent and seeing progress, whatever meaning for you. Then it happens: Suddenly or slowly, you get hurt and need to spend a while on the sidelines.

If movement is a crucial a part of your life, injuries that take you away from it could possibly be physically and mentally tough. Trust me, I do know—I’m a recreational runner who’s handled every thing from knee pain to emphasize fractures. The topic is such a very important one to me that I cowrote a book () and cohost a podcast () on it.

The emotional challenges of sports and fitness injuries—a shaken sense of identity, a lack of community, a disruption in your normal stress-coping mechanisms, and a fear of getting hurt again, amongst others—make the means of resuming your routine much more fraught and unsure. But while every one and injury is different, there are some common principles to guide you back to play. Follow them, and you simply might end up in a greater spot than where you began.

1. Get official clearance to start out back up again.

Even when you don’t your injury is that serious, it’s a superb idea to get some personalized advice on managing each your recovery and your return, Meghan Bishop, MDan orthopedic sports medicine surgeon in New Jersey, tells SELF. This will allow you to determine an approximate timeline for recovery, in addition to allow you to work out what might need caused your injury in the primary place—so you possibly can each address underlying causes and ease back in safely, she says.

Your “hype squad” can include medical pros in a wide range of fields, including sports medicine, physical therapy, personal training, sports dietetics, and mental health therapy, Amanda Katza licensed personal trainer and running coach in New York City, tells SELF. These pros can offer individualized guidance on the sorts of movement you possibly can and needs to be doing as you heal to advertise recovery and prepare to your return to your major activity.

Exactly where to start and the way quickly to ramp back up will depend on a wide selection of things—the character of your injury, how long you’ve been away, and the way much stress you’re under, as an illustration. That’s one reason it’s super helpful to get individualized advice, slightly than depend on generalized tips about social media, Katz says.

Of course, a lot of people face barriers to accessing physical or mental health care—costs may be high, even with insurance, and quick appointments may be hard to come back by. But investing as much time and money as you possibly can, even when it’s seeing a health care provider or PT for an appointment or two, can prevent you from developing a much bigger (and costlier) problem in a while, she says.

2. Track your pain…

Listening to your body may be tricky if you’re getting back from an injury. You might wonder: Is that niggle normal or a cry for help? “When you’re injured, your brain has gone right into a protective mode,” certified mental performance consultant Carrie Jackson, my podcast cohost and book coauthor, tells SELF. “You’re often hyper-tuned into every sensation you are feeling in [that] a part of your body.”