After an injury, keeping fit so as not to put on weight is an issue that worries us all, both popular runners and athletes of any other discipline. Injuries often keep us away from achieving our objectives, our goals and even our day-to-day life.
We may have to put away our running shoes for a season, but there are a series of exercises, guidelines and other plans that we can continue to perform in order not to lose our fitness.
How to keep fit if you are injured so as not to put on weight? Is it really possible?
We talked to Iker Muñoz, sports director of RUNNEA, to find out if it is really possible to keep in shape and not put on weight when we suffer an injury and how to do it. He tells us that the option to continue training and stay physically active depends on several factors:
- Motivation of each athlete.
- Extent of the injury: some injuries affect specific areas of the body but this does not prevent exercising with others.
- Recovery process: sometimes injuries require total immobilization for recovery. Even so, if we find ourselves with a lower extremity injury, we can continue to work the core and upper extremities to maintain energy expenditure.
Change in exercise intensity, nutrition or rest?
The degree of exercise intensity will depend on what we can do, taking into account the possibilities set by our injury. Thus, in most cases the intensity, the volume of work and the frequency will be affected, but the volume and frequency should be, as far as possible, very close to the values that were pursued before suffering the injury.
Training and rest should always go hand in hand. To improve performance it is necessary to train, but also to rest.
Iker Muñoz points out that our work changes its orientation as a result of an injury, making it necessary to vary the times between sessions. It is also important to make a caloric adjustment depending on the physical activity we perform, as sometimes food is a key factor in the process of regeneration and / or recovery for some types of injuries.
What do I do once I have recovered from the injury?
Once recovered from the injury, it is essential to follow a progression in terms of intensity, volume and frequency of sessions. We should not become obsessed with trying to do everything we did before the injury, it is necessary to set small short-term goals and go through the stages of recovery, starting with more general exercises and then moving on to more specific exercises related to the sporting gesture.
"Reaching the pre-injury fitness level will depend on factors such as: the importance of the injury, the activity during the injury period, the evolution of the injury and an endless number of variables," points out our sports director. We should not set strict dates for recovery because we do not know how our body will react to specific stimuli.
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