Getting injured at work can be terrible – it often isn’t your fault and sometimes is caused by your employer’s negligence, so the unjust nature of it can put extra stress on your mind and body. Workplace injuries can vary massively, but whether your injury is mild or severe, you can’t be blamed for wanting to stay fit afterward. The key to maintaining fitness is to go low-impact.
Low-Impact vs High-Impact
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When you think about exercise, you probably think of high-impact exercise – staying fit through running, cycling, lifting weights, and more. These exercises burn high amounts of calories but can damage the joints of even the healthiest people. The trick is to replace high-impact exercises with lower-impact exercises, but first, you need to be healthy enough for those.
Make Sure You’ve Recovered Enough
If your accident was severe, you should not go back to exercise immediately without the express instructions of a medical professional. Often, to afford the best medical treatment for your injury, you need some form of legal representation to help you deal with an employer if they were at fault for the injury. If you go for a high-caliber lawyer like Horst Shewmaker, they will fill out all the insurance forms for you and connect you with experts for your personal injuries, so you can get to the right level of recovery faster.
Change your Routine
Once you’re fit enough to get back to exercise, you need to change your routine to avoid any high-impact exercises that you might have previously done. Some good examples of how to do so are to replace running with power-walking. If you run or jog, there’s a lot of pressure on the tendons in your lower body, as well as your cartilage. Walking is a good alternative, but you need to walk further distances than you would have to run. There is also the fact that, unless you are fortunate enough to have some hilly walking spots nearby, there might not be enough cardio-vascular activity for you to burn fat with the time you have to exercise.
A good alternative to running is the elliptical machine. These machines are gentler on your body – they work in a similar way to how you ski with poles; your body is in-sync, and you move your limbs smoothly, without the pressure on your joints, cartilage, and tendons that running inflicts.
Swimming is also an excellent workout. It can be highly aerobic but doesn’t come with any of the negatives of land-based sports and exercise due to your insulation from gravity. By suspending your joints in water, there is no sudden impact as your feet hit the floor. Your joints are supported by the water, taking pressure off them, which allows your muscles to rip in a safer way for the rest of your body. The good thing about swimming is that you can do it at your own pace and there are many different strokes you can choose from, depending on the area where you suffered an injury.
