Training with Injury or Disability

My personal training career actually started in a physical therapy setting. Since then, I have learned a tremendous amount about the human body, health and fitness, and wanted to relate it back to my past experiences.

Movement is truly the expression of life and without it our bodies can quickly fall into a state of dysfunction, depression, and sickness. The body is made to move, and move a lot, so the first thing to understand is that the more you move, the better. This can be any movement, from swimming to stretching to working on machines to using a handrail to help take a few steps. When we move, our muscles are required to contract, which requires our nervous system to wake up and our brain to start transmitting messages. Our blood begins to flow and our heart rate elevates, increasing the oxygen usage in the body. All of this means that toxins are more readily removed, nutrients are delivered to our cells and our brain, and our nervous system is forced to figure out how to coordinate our movement, creating energy and adaptation within the body. This process is what the body thrives on! No matter what our limitation, movement is the answer.

Obviously injury and disability are different topics, but they both deal with limitations, so I wanted to talk about them in the same piece. With injury, the focus is to let the area heal while still engaging the rest of the body, and as soon as possible, to restore movement to the injury area. Let’s take a leg injury for example. It would be important to do whatever necessary to reduce inflammation and support healing, but during the rest and recovery period, training the healthy leg will be key. There is energy, neuromuscular connections and strength that will transfer over from the training of the healthy leg, and as mentioned before, the increased blood flow from any activity will help keep the time of recovery to a minimum. I would also like to add that it is always important to determine why there was an injury in the first place, because often, injury is more a result of poor movement patterns or asymmetries in the body than a blunt force or random occurrence. This will be important to discuss with a physical therapist or trainer, but you want to make sure that you are not cleared as recovered just because there is no more pain.

When it comes to training with disabilities, there are two goals to keep in mind. First we must work around the disability and then we must try to work through it. While those with disabilities may never fully gain movement, there has been promising work done by Emilie Conrad who has used her philosophy of continuum movement in working with spinal cord injury patients. The patients can have little to no movement at all, but by working slowly and consistently, she helps them gain back some of their movement by focusing on the smallest of movement and working up from there. So in terms of working around the disability, this would involve doing whatever movements your body will allow. If you’re recovering from a stroke and your left leg and arm do not work, use your right side to actively engage in as much movement as possible. For working through the disability, it is all about working every day to develop movement. I remember working with a stroke patient that could barely walk, but we used parallel bars so that he could balance himself with his right side and then work every day to keep his left side active. We would work on the small movements, but over time, those movements got bigger. It was slow, but that is what the body needs.

For those of you with injuries or disabilities, I hope that you have a good support system and knowledgeable therapists to give you the guidance you need. If you are interested in more specifically what you should do for exercise, please check out my other posts on exercise and modify them to your situation. There are obviously many different situations that people are in, but in the end, movement is always a good thing. Good luck and keep moving!

Colin