How to Get Active After an Injury: 8 Tips to Get You Back on Feet
Whether you’ve been through a traumatic car accident, severely tore a ligament while playing your favorite sport, or simply experienced an age-related fall, you know that injuries tend to impact your life long after you’ve been treated for them.
Getting back into your normal routine and enjoying an active lifestyle doesn’t have to be impossible, though. With a bit of help and a few daily practices, you can reclaim your life.
Here are 8 tips from our experts to help you get active after an injury.
1: Follow All Doctor Recommendations Precisely
The first thing you can do to return to an active life is follow the doctor’s instructions to the T after you receive treatment.
It’s common for patients to feel a little better and skip certain parts of the healing process, such as recommended therapy sessions, follow-up visits, or movement restrictions.
This often makes the healing process much more difficult, and it can make the situation worse. Simply following instructions post-surgery, treatment, or doctor visits can go a long way toward getting you back on your feet in a reasonable period.
2: Don’t Overexert Yourself
If you lived an active lifestyle before your injury, we know that it feels nearly impossible not to push yourself as hard as possible to get back to normal. It’s a habit, and it has likely been your lifestyle for a long time.
However, your drive and determination can work against you in this case.
You never want to push yourself so hard to recover that you end up causing another injury or re-injuring yourself. While your goal is to get better faster, you can end up in a lot more pain with a lot longer to go before you’re ready to get active, again.
Knowing how far is too far can be difficult, as well. Especially since you’ll start feeling stronger quickly once you start a proper recovery program. However, we have a solution for that, which we’ll talk about later.
3: Move as Much as Possible
With recovery, a lot of your ability to succeed will come down to balance. You don’t want to overwork yourself or ignore a doctor’s orders, but you also don’t want to simply lay on the couch and watch the world go by hoping you’ll feel better soon.
Within the restrictions your medical team has given you, you want to keep your body moving as much as you can. That can be as little as doing some seated stretches and slowly working your way up to more normal daily tasks, or it can mean going through a daily workout routine. It all depends on your unique circumstances.
This helps work the muscles to keep you in shape, but it also stimulates healing and gets you back to normal a lot faster than just lying around.
4: Use the Right Exercises
Working and stretching your muscles is crucial to your recovery, but you need to do the right ones if you want to see meaningful results.
You can use a vast variety of exercises to target core problem areas and strengthen supporting muscles without putting undue stress on your injury.
If you can leverage those exercises in your favor, you can help your body strengthen itself in ways that mitigate the injury’s impact on your day-to-day life. This is often used to help with chronic back pain.
For example, while the lower back might be weaker from an injury and cause pain, therapists often recommend exercises that strengthen the supporting muscles to alleviate stress on the lower back.
5: Manage Your Diet
Your diet might not have anything to do with your injury, but it can have a lot to do with your recovery.
In general, certain foods and drinks can increase inflammation and cause more pain and discomfort. If that happens, you’re less likely to be able to exercise appropriately to facilitate healing, and other aspects of your life will be impacted.
If you’re already an extremely athletic person, your eating habits might be even more important to look at. You likely eat a more calorie-dense diet to help with your daily routine, but if you suddenly can’t exercise as much, continuing that high-calorie diet can be problematic. Weight gain can make exercising more difficult, apply more pressure to the injury increase your pain, etc.
This isn’t always the case, but your diet does need to be considered.
6: Focus on Inflammation Reduction
Injuries tend to cause a lot of inflammation and swelling whether it’s visible or not. One of the best ways to help reduce this is the liberal use of ice on the affected body part. Especially early in the healing process.
When you get done stretching, finish your therapy appointment, or just get off a long day of work, wrap an ice pack in a cloth or paper towel, and apply it to the affected area for 15 minutes to half an hour.
7: Stay Positive
It’s easy to start feeling down when your life is thrown for a loop, but your mindset does have an impact on your body’s ability to heal.
Try to remember that you’re going to get better, and when you start feeling negative, distract yourself with something positive you enjoy that is within your physical limits.
8: Sign Up for Manual Therapy
Finally, you don’t have to do this alone, and it’s best that you don’t.
Whether your doctor recommends physical therapy, or you notice that an ongoing problem simply isn’t going away, therapy can be the best way to get back to an active lifestyle.
Manual therapists can help you in a variety of ways. You’ll receive guided, professionally designed physical therapy treatments that target the core problem, dietary guidance, and more in a safe environment. You don’t have to worry about doing too much or too little, doing the wrong exercises, or accidentally making your problem worse.
Contact Expert Manual Therapy Today
Getting active after an injury is a difficult process, but manual therapy can help. As long as you have the right therapist.
Expert Manual Therapy is home to qualified experts based in Austin, TX, who not only help you recover but also prioritize your safety and comfort while doing so. We can help you recover from various injuries, maintain your dietary needs, and learn preventative measures that will keep you on your feet in the future.
Contact Expert Manual Therapy today.
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