The Injury Problem: How to Come Back from Injury

Last week I wrote about preventing injuries. This week, I would like to touch on what you should do when an injury happens. I am not a doctor, and I generally recommend that be your first step if you have an active injury. I am also not a physical therapist. I cannot prescribe specific movements to help treat your issue and address the deeper causes of your injury.

However, once you are through the acute period of an injury, I do have some advice on how to move past it and get back to doing the things that are important to you.

There are many kinds of injuries, and I cannot address specifics in one short blog post, but I will touch on some of the basics of healing and recovery. I think much of this advice can apply to any injury, including persistent back pain, postpartum recovery, major illness recovery, and post-surgery recovery, but if you have a serious injury you are recovering from, take my advice only after your medical teams’ advice.

Here are some helpful steps you can take to get back to your life.

1. See a doctor, do your treatment, go to physical therapy. If it is serious enough for you to wonder whether you need to see a doctor, it probably is, and it doesn’t hurt to ask. If you have had a serious injury, take the time to get proper treatment. Give yourself the time off to heal, and not further exacerbate the injury. Most insurance will also cover a few physical therapy sessions without a referral. If you think talking to a physical therapist would be helpful, take advantage of that.

2. Accept that you are injured. Mentally, it is important to accept that an injury is keeping you from the activities you love, and once you accept it, you can embrace a healing mindset, rather than negative self-talk. Some people spiral into telling themselves they should just push through, they should be able to get past it easily, they compare themselves to others. This is not helpful, and it will not help you get to where you want to be.

3. Don’t rest too much! The traditional advice of resting until you are fully healed has been debunked again and again in the last decade or so. If you have a minor injury, rest a day or two, ice, hot pad, get good sleep and food, but then gently ease back into activity. Gently moving an injured joint, muscle, bone, even, will bring blood into the affected area and increase your body’s natural healing processes. If you have an injury with a longer-term healing trajectory, gentle movement will be key to healing without losing function.

4. Move GENTLY. This is a place where many avid exercisers will go wrong. They will feel better, and jump immediately to the level of training they were at before their injury. This is not going to help. Healing takes time. For things like joints, tendons, deep tissue, spinal injuries, it takes a LONG time. Get back to movement, but take some gentler alternatives. The goal is to increase blood flow with minimal impact. Some great options are: walking; swimming and water aerobics; or mat work like pilates and yoga. If you return to your usual exercise, make sure to start scaling way back, and be prepared to stop if your injury shows any signs of irritation.

5. Set a goal. If you have long-term chronic pain from an injury, have received treatment, and are still in pain which cannot be fixed, it can help to start by setting a goal. In the book Talking Back by Dr. Rowland Hazard, he breaks this down well, and I recommend the book if you are suffering from chronic back pain. But setting a goal means identifying what it is you truly NEED to be able to do that your pain is preventing you from doing, and gently, steadily pursuing it. If you need to be able to lift your child, or stand on your feet for 8 hours a day for work, that should be your goal. Then you should take baby steps to pursue that goal, brushing up against the pain but not doing anything too intense to worsen it.

6. Embrace the roller coaster. If you are having chronic pain and flare-ups, acknowledge that there will be good days, and there will be bad days. You need a plan for bad days. What can you cut? What do you need to prioritize? Over time, if you have addressed the underlying cause and are moving again, you will get better, but there will be setbacks. Don’t let these rob you of all hope. Remind yourself that it is just a bad day, and not indicative of a total downward trajectory. In the next day, or a few days from now, it will get better again, and you just have to keep moving through this rough day until then.

7. Let go of fear. Sometimes the fear of hurting again keeps us from doing anything, including the things that will help. Much of coming back from an injury is learning how to safely use your body again, but you can’t do that if you are afraid to move. The nervous system has worked hard to protect you from that injury, but now it is fighting you. You need to continually teach your nervous system through movement that you are safe, your injury is healed, and you can do activities again when you felt unsafe doing so just a short period before.

Mindset is a big part of recovery. Find ways to give yourself hope.

This is a lot of words to say that an injury takes time to recover from, sometimes years. If it happens, the sooner you embrace your limitation and get a realistic plan to heal from it, the sooner you will be back to living your life free from fear of re-igniting the injury, of dealing with pain again.

I hope this is helpful. Tell me about some of the ways you have dealt with injuries. Was there a form of movement that worked especially well for you?

For me, water aerobics were a life-saver. I could barely get out of bed when I herniated my L5-S1 disc, had shooting leg pain, could not even stand up straight, but getting in the water and moving gently freed up some movement in my spine and helped me get to a better place.