Any injury affecting muscles, joints, or bones may limit your ability to work out.

1. Work Around the Injury.

There are ways around this. You can safely do exercises to strengthen, stretch, and move other body areas unaffected by the injury. This is your opportunity to make sure all other muscle groups remain healthy, strong, and active during the healing process.

2. Listen to Your Pain. Pain is our body’s way of telling us something is wrong. Limit activities that increase pain, both with exercise and everyday activities. For example, avoid the injury site if standing for long periods aggravates it. Try the task sitting. Also, aim to perform exercises and stretches in a pain-free range of motion.

3. Gradual Return to Fitness. Getting back to fitness after an injury needs to be done at a slow and gradual pace. Once you are cleared to start exercise again, it can be easy to want to jump back into your pre-injury workout routine. However, this is not recommended and can lead to (1) reinjury or (2) a new injury involving a different body part. The best way to get back to fitness is to slowly reintroduce activity by limiting your volume, intensity, and duration of exercise.

4. Pre and Post Fitness. What you do before and after a workout is as important as the workout itself. Before exercise, your warm-up should include stretching, light cardio, and dynamic movements that mimic your activity. This increases your body temperature and blood flow to the working muscles.

After your workout, allowing your body to cool down is essential. Static stretches, deep breathing techniques, form rolling or low-intensity cardio can restore your body temperature, blood pressure, and heart rate to normal (pre-exercise) levels.

5. Prevention of Future Injuries. As you build confidence towards a full recovery, taking steps to prevent re-injury or future problems is essential.