Training when injured

My friend was out running in the rain the other day, slipped and twisted her knee.  It is now lovely and swollen and she has been advised to avoid too much force going through her knee.

So what does she do now?  Does she have to lay up for a couple of weeks recovering and possibly losing some of the fitness she has trained hard to gain?  Of course not!  This is where cross training (and a little imagination) comes in!

First of all, here is the usual obvious disclaimer:

As with any injury, get it checked out by someone who knows what they are talking about.  It is stupid being all macho, ignoring an injury or “training through” it and screwing up your body for months/years to come.

Pain is a signal from your body that something is wrong.  Listen to it!

Then you need to find out what things are best to avoid.  In the case of my friend, it is higher impact, explosive forces.  Especially those that can force the knee in directions it does not like.  Knees do not like sideways or twisting forces.  They only like bending back and forth.

So for the moment, running, jumping and sudden changes in direction is out.  But her upper body is fine, and simple straightening/bending of the knee is also fine.  So instead of focussing on what we can’t do, we need to focus on the various things we can do…and then get doing it!

This is called cross training…or doing something different to complement our goals.

So simple things first.

Cycling

Cycling.  This involves simple, predictable bending/straightening of the knees, with virtually zero impact.  It maintains mobility of the swollen joint, increases blood flow (which can help healing), maintains leg strength and is fantastic cardio vascular exercise (it gets you out of breath).

Swimming.  Avoiding breast stroke where you can.  Breast stroke kicking has sideways forces going through the legs (not what an injured knee wants).  And on a side note, if you swim like most people (including myself untill recently), you arch your spine and neck back sooo much in an attempt to keep your face out of the water so you can breathe.  Stick your face in the water between breaths.  Your fitness/neck/spine will thank you for it!  Anyway.  In my friends case, she might want to swim front crawl, or back stroke.  This involves simple kicking of the legs back and forth (again, in the direction knees like) and is great for fitness.

Upper body erg – or the arm bike

Upper body ergometer (arm bike).  We have one of these in the gym and they are great.  No legs involved at all, so you don’t have to worry about aggravating an injury, so you can concentrate on working hard!

Rowing.  I love these machines!  But make sure you do them right.  Sit tall to look after your spine, and make sure when you bend your knees, they are between your arms.  Don’t twist them out so your arms are between your knees.  Remember, knees don’t like twisting!

Punching the bag.  Be honest now…are you really all that surprised I’m suggesting this?  I LOVE it.  You will just have to make sure you stay in one place.  No Ali-Shuffle for the moment.  Just stand in front of the bag and show it who is boss and keep out of breath.

Increasing your Background Activity levels.  If you are seriously struggling to find any form of training, then make sure that the rest of your time is not spent sitting down watching X-Factor.  Do something, anything else.

We will all get injured at some point.  The trick is to not throw our arms in the air and say

“buggerit!  I’m screwed!  I may as well sit here and eat cake until I’m fixed!”

Instead, we just work out what we can do, then get on and do it until we are able to get back into training for real.

1. Get injury checked out by someone who knows what they are talking about and start re-hab.
2. Find out activities/exercises you can do that do not aggrevate injury (eg if you lower limbs are injured, use upper limbs more and vice versa).
3. Adapt your training plan accordingly, then get on with being consistant.

Please do your bit and “share” this with your friends with the buttons below.  Ta!

Well done to my mate, Karen Driver, who has just competed in the world masters swimming championships!  She got a 7th in the 800 metre freestyle, 9th in the 400 metre freestyle and 12th in the 400 metre individual medley.

Karen Driver Swimming

I used to train with her in the gym before she got a better job and I loved it!  She was the first person in yeeears to really push me.

If you want to improve your health/fitness/strength, train with someone who is better than you, then just try to keep up!

I came across this article (click here) about hypertension (high blood pressure) this morning.  In my work I regularly come across people with hypertension, so here is some key information about it…

Reading blood pressure

Currently, hypertension is defined as having a sustained blood pressure of over 140/90.  According to the NHS 40% of adults in England suffer from hypertension and all available evidence shows that your lifestyle plays a significant role in regulating your blood pressure. Risk factors for high blood pressure include:

• Age
• Excessive alcohol consumption
• Poor diet
• Lack of exercise
• Obesity.

Of those risk factors, only one of them is out of our control (age, in case you couldn’t guess which one).  All the others are a result of the choices we make…we choose to drink too much, eat badly, not exercise and get fat.

And that is great news!  Because that means we just need to choose to change these things!  

Click here for 10 simple rules to improve everybodys diet.

Click here to find out about improving your exercise levels.

Click here to find out about losing excess bodyfat.

But here are some specific guidelines for people who suffer from hypertension:

Goals

• Reduce blood pressure
• Reduce risks of chronic heart disease
• Increase physical activity levels
• Reduce bodyfat levels

Types of exercise

• For aerobic exercise, choose large muscle group activities such as walking, cycling, rowing, stepping, group exercise classes, swimming.
• For resistance exercises, perform them in a circuit fashion.  This means do a single set of the first exercise, then move directly onto the first set of the next exercise etc.  Once you have performed 1 set of each resistance exercise, loop back to the beginning and do the second set in the same fashion.

Things to avoid

• Holding your breath, especially during resistance exercises.  This can spike your blood pressure in a few seconds.  So keep breathing steadily all the time.
• Isometric contractions.  This means holding your muscles tight in one position for a period of a few seconds or more.  Make sure your body keeps moving all the time.  Be aware that gripping a bar/weight/object tightly is a form of isometric contraction…so keep a light, loose grip on any equipment you may be holding.
• Overhead resistance work.  This one is dependant on the person.  Some people can do this, while it makes others feel dizzy/faint.  If you are one of these people, avoid it.
• Decline exercises.  These are ones where your head is below the height of your body.

How often

• Aerobic exercises should be done 3-7 days per week.  Start with however often you feel comfortable with, but gradually progress to trying to do some every day.
• Resistance exercises should be done 2-3 times per week.

How long for

• For aerobic exercises, 30-60 minutes.  Choose steady, continuous activities instead of short, intermittent bursts.
• For resistance exercises, choose 10-15 reps for 1-3 circuits.

How intense

• For aerobic exercises, low to moderate intensity.  Aim to be comfortably out of breath and still able to hold a conversation with someone.  For the technically minded, your heart rate should be between 40-70% of maximum.
• For resistance exercises, keep intensity low.  Remember, the aim is not to have you gritting your teeth and struggling to push a weight, but to keep your body moving in steady, continuous movements.

What next

Once you find a workout too easy:

1. increase duration (make it last longer)
2. increase frequency (do it more often)
3. increase intensity (make it harder)

in that order!

And as always, if you live in and around the Skipton area, feel free to contact me for one to one coaching.

This is a call out to anyone who:

• Cannot swim yet
• Wants to learn to swim
• Doesn’t mind being on TV
• Can get to the swimming pools at either Burnley or Colne in Lancashire

If the above sounds like you, I need to hear from you NOW!

Just contact me by clicking here, or leave a comment below.

Thanks!

My friend Karen is a very good swimmer and she train 5-6 days a week.  In an event like swimming, you need both very good conditioning (so you don’t run out of puff and sink) and very good technique (so you don’t waste energy as you go through the water).

We were looking at Karens current training timetable and she cycles through “hard” and “easy” days each week.  What this meant was, she would crank it up to 11 and go all out on her “hard” days, but simply ease back and go through the motions on her “easy” days.

This kind of thing is ok for getting your body in the right condition, but doesn’t really do anything to improve your technique.  You can’t improve your technique if you are concentrating solely on going fast…and you can’t improve your technique if you are “going through the motions” and disengaging your brain.

So we simply changed the names of her workouts…nothing else has changed…just the names.  They are now “intensity” days and “technique” days.

• Intensity Days - the priority is working at a high enough intensity to improve her conditioning.  Don’t worry too much if the technique is a bit raggedy…just work the body hard enough to get a training response.
• Technique Days - the priority is getting her form perfect.  Don’t worry that she is not so fast today (she is supposed to be taking it easy today anyway), just make sure the form is spot on.

This way every training session has a goal to aim for and has a purpose.  There is never any “going through the motions”, and you don’t run the risk of burning yourself out by over training.

Even though only the names have changed, psychologically speaking, this makes a hell of a difference!

The same idea can be applied to any event.  We get better by working hard and getting fitter…and by moving better and more efficiently.

So instead of having “rest” or “easy” days…have “technique” days.  It keeps us moving and avoids us just filling time with “stuff”.

Congratulations to my friend Karen Driver who competed in the European Masters Swimming Championships in Cadiz last week.

She got 4th in the 800 metre freestyle (only missing out on the bronze by 0.6 sec! ), and knocking 3 seconds off her personal best!

She got 3rd in the 400 metre freestyle (yay!!! )

And she got 13th in the open water freestyle, knocking a fantastic 3 minutes off her personal best!

Karen Driver Swimming

We have trained together a lot here in the gym, and we worked hard to make the time as productive as possible.  She spends hours every day in the pool, so the last thing she needs is “work for works sake” in the gym.  We scaled back on exercises that were not helping her with swimming and fine tuned others to make them as specific as possible to her events.

The only reason we were in the gym was to improve her swimming time.  So there was no thought of showing off, posing in the mirror, or doing the things the bodybuilding boys were doing.

“If it did not directly help with improving her swim time, we didn’t bother with it.”

I loved every minute of training with her, because we got loads of strange looks from all the bodybuilding boys confused as to what we were doing.  I even got told i was training “wrong” because i wasn’t “isolating the muscles”!  The human body does not work in isolation.  It is 1 incredibly complex unit that needs to work in a coordinated fashion.  So that’s how it should be trained.

The most important moves we were doing were big, compound exercises (full depth heavy squats, pullups etc), explosive plyometrics for the legs (to help improve her turns) and very swimming specific moves on the cable machine (so we were “swimming” on dry land!).

Barbell Squat

Vertical jump

It highlighted a big difference between people in the gym.  Some come in and do things because it looks good/sexy/cool (and they read it in a magazine that sell a lot of “supplements”), and we come in and do things because they WORK!

What kind of person are you?