Continuing Your Workout During An Injury

Last week I was competeing in an 8k road race, felt great on race day, warmed up really well, and was very ready to set a new personal record. The gun went off and I was going strong. I mean I was feeling awesome...for about 2 and a half minutes! That's when I felt a little twinge in my right calf. I've been through this before and I warmed up well, plus it was 95 dregrees out, so I knew my muscles were warm, so I thought I would keep going and try to get it to work itself out. I slowed down my pace a little and stopped pushing so much off my toes. Well, it only got worse...and worse...and worse. Then my ego got in the way because it was a race. I don't like to quit, so I didn't. I should have though. I barely made it accross the finish line. The next day I could hardly walk. I was so mad at myself that I didn't stop when I should have.

Here's the bad thing...I had the best training the previous two weeks and really felt that I had broken through a plateau and was about to do great things in my running.

Now, I can barely walk, and can no longer train like I want to. So the big question is...what do I do now?


I can stop everything to let it heal, and lose all the training I've done. Or I can figure out how to keep doing what I was doing before in a different way. I had to stay off my leg and no pushing off the toes at all. So on Monday, even though I was limping pretty badly, I road a recumant bike for about 15 minutes very slowly, no resistance. Then iced the calf afterwords, and a couple more times that day. On tuesday, my normal interval training day, I did my intervals on the bike. I did 1 minute hard on that bike, with resistance training (mostly seated) between each minute on the bike. I ended up doing 15 intervals on the bike with about 2 minutes of resistance training between each. It hurt like crap, but I knew I wasn't putting any stress on it, as I was pushing the peddles with my heels, not toes. I aslo made sure I iced it a few times that day.

I continued to do get other cardio workouts in that entire week with the bike and an arm ergometer (that's a bike for the arms, not the legs-great cardio!). Plus I still did my usual resistance training, just not much on my legs.

Basically a week later, yesterday, I attempted to run. I really thought I wasn't going to be able to make it very far. I didn't even know if I could make it to the corner and back. I went slow and steady, and ended up going 4 miles. Lungs felt good due to the bike training, and calf felt pretty good. I iced again, and just this morning I went out for another run. I was just going to see how it felt, no plan or anything. I ended up going six miles. I couldn't have done that without the cardio training I did when I was injured.

So when you are injured, which we all are at some point or another, don't stop your training. Just made simple modifications according to your injury and keep going. I could have given up. believe me I wanted to last Sunday when I couldn't walk, but I kept going because I knew I could come up with other ways of doing the same thing.

Chad Cannon is the owner of Shaping Concepts in Bluffton, SC, and is known as the Fat Loss Expert throughout the low country. he can be reached at chad@shapingconcepts.com