Don’t let an injury prevent you from reaching your goal

March 14th, 2014 by

If you train long enough you’re eventually going to have an injury of some kind. Some of them will heal up quickly on their own and you’ll be right back to full strength and yet others may require a cast, brace, surgery, or rehabilitation.

The point here though, is that just because you are injured does not mean that you have to throw in the towel and give up on your goals.

If your lower body is injured there is no reason why you can’t continue to train your upper body. And if your upper body is injured there is no reason why you can’t continue to train your lower body.

In either case, it is always possible to find some sort of cardio or metabolic work if that is also necessary to make progress towards your goal. You just have to be creative.

Sure, if your leg is in a cast it is going to be difficult to limp your way around the gym. If you’ve recently had shoulder surgery you’re probably not going to be able to hold weights in that hand so you’ll have to find another means to train your legs.

But that does not mean that these things cannot be done. In fact, I would contend that you can still make progress while you are injured.

Since fat loss is primarily driven by your diet, you can still lose body fat while you’re injured.

And there is no reason you can’t build your legs while your upper body is injured or vice versa.

Of course, if you’re in a building phase and worried about becoming disproportionate, maybe this would be a good time to step down to a maintenance intake for a while and keep right on training.

The bottom line here is that any you can either treat an injury like a roadblock or a speed bump. If you treat in like the roadblock then you’re not going to make progress and even possibly going to lose the progress you’ve made during that time only to have to make it up again later.

However, if you treat it like a speed bump, you can continue to make progress even in the face of the injury.