The best exercises for you when you’re injured are obviously dependent on the injury. But it’s equally true that all exercises for those who are injured will tend to be significantly different from exercises for people who aren’t at all injured. You have to be a lot more careful about not making the injury any worse, for example. And the emphasis has to be on curing the injury in a safe way.
Exercises for Blood Flow
The most important thing after a leg injury is often to make sure that you continually increase circulation to your legs. It’s the blood that’s going to help with healing by providing oxygen and nutrients to the affected area, after all. First, rotate your ankle or move your foot vertically tor in any direction to help with circulation. Then, contract any muscles in the area, such as thigh muscles or toes for a few seconds, and then release. This will tell your body that it needs to add more blood circulation to those areas. After you feel like blood is flowing well to your legs, you can slowly bend your knees to your chest and then move them back down again to further optimize blood flow.
Range of Motion Exercises
One of the biggest problems after an injury is decreased flexibility in the affected area. For example, in your ankle you can help with flexibility by slowly moving your ankle toward you, and then away from you again. Another strategy is to “write” the alphabet using your foot. Move your foot through motions that would write “a” to “z” on the floor. This helps it go through the full range of motions you regularly need from the area. Obviously, the most important thing here is to be very careful and to take even more care when it comes to stretching then you would normally.
Balance Exercises
Doing balance exercises can help reduce injuries as well as bring you back from them. They require you to use various parts of your body together in a simple way, which is important if an injury has prevented you from doing this for a while. For example, you can balance on one foot for as long as possible. If you can increase the amount of time that you can do this for day by day, then you will have a tangible way to measure increasing balance. It will also give you a way to see how quickly you are coming back from an injury that has affected your balance.
Machine Exercise
When you have an injury, the first step in recovering from it is not making it any worse. Not all exercises will be good at achieving this goal. That’s why it helps to use something like an elliptical trainer in these situations. This is because elliptical allow you to stretch out your muscles without putting any strain on your joints, and it’s often joints that sustain injuries. Overall, recovering from an injury in a slow and reasonable way with the aid of a trainer is the most important thing you can do to speed your recovery time and ensure that it is effective.
