Looking back at Leavitt Peak during a Winter Circle to Sonora Pass, over Leavitt, then back down to Highway 395. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Backpacking Injury Recovery
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Section Two:
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Beginning
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Beginning Injury Recovery Page Index |
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This Page> Starting an Injury Recovery Program | ||
Page Index Broad Physical and Psychological impacts First Stretching Video:
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This page offers a brief introduction to considerations prior to starting a fitness program. | |
The Next Injury Recovery Page: | ||
Beginning A Second Stretching Video: Third Stretching Video |
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Forward |
Beginning an Injury Recovery Program |
When to Start The key to starting a successful recovery program is giving your injury proper time to heal. When you start rehabilitating the injured part it is viatal that you do not re injure yourself. Understanding when it's time to take that broken ankle, sprained knee, or dislocated shoulder and start gently working it back into shape with range of motion and light stretching exercises is vital to a timely and complete recovery. If you start too early you can re injure yourself and induce long-term chronic pains by straining damaged or weak tendons and ligaments. If you wait too long, the injured joint will stiffen up and be very hard to restore to its full flexibility and strength. Being either too early or too late in starting your recovery program can also result in long term chronic pains. Too early of exercise after an injury can further damage the injury, while being too late to apply exercise risks long-term inflexibility and weakness. Beginning range of motion, stretching, and introducing light exercise at just the right times in your healing process gives you the best chance of full recovery with minimal after effects, and that's what we are shooting for here. If you have been sedentary the time to start is now. But you should have the same cautions as one who is recovering from an injury. You too should gradually engage yourself with stretching and walking to ascertain your level of fitness and flexibility. Rehabing an injury requires the most sensivity and feedback for success. So too restarting or starting a fitness program requires these same skills of sensitivity and feedback. You must work yourself properly, at your level of capacity, to avoid injury and overwork. Post Injury Timing Consult your doctor about the proper time to begin physical therapy after an injury. Most times I find the doctors and physical therapists are pushing people to get back on it long before the patient is willing. Most patients wait much longer to begin exercies than required by the injury. Make no mistake about it: injuries require work for full recovery. Exercise and stretching can really speed healing and recovery, but working an injury too early or too hard for its level of healing is highly counterproductive. If the doctors are urging physical engagement, and you are still experiencing acute pain and instability, give their program a fair chance. Get them to issues you a list of stretches, and begin to very gently work on your flexibility, range of motion, strengthening, and beginning to build enduracne. You may have to snatch your first bits of strength and flexibility out of the jaws of acute pain at the start of a serious injury recovery program. If this light stretching and exercise flames you out in pain, you likely need a bit more rest and recovery, some anti-inflammatories, or less strenous stretching and exercise. Recover from this pain and try again, but this time with some pre-emptive anti-inflamatories, less strenous exercise, and greater recovery periods between exercise sessions. The Endless Start Point After a severe injury to a complex joint, such as your knee, hip, or shoulder it may take years for you to be able to work the injured joint back to full strength. It depends on how your injured part responds to your first attempts at flexibility and strengthening. If your injured parts respond with acute pain you must immediately stop. Strength and endurance cannot be maintained during episodes of extreme acute pain. But there are a couple of counter-intutive elements to this cycle of pain. If your stretching and strengthening sparks acute pain you must stop, but you may notice that you hurt less the next day. Though the stretching my cause immediate pain in the injured part, you may find that you are able to gradually increase the duration of your stretches and the stress of your strengthing exercises before triggering acute pain at the time of exercise, and the next day. This will be your toehold for slowly recovering, slowly getting more physical bang for your pain bucks. By being very careful and gradually building up flexibility and strength in the face of easily triggered acute pain, you may be able to slowly increase your capacities without excessive danger of reinjury or sparking extended periods of acute pain. With a bit of patience, time, luck, and proper medication you should be able to execute your basic stretches and strengtheniing exercises without sparking acute pain. Or your injuries may respond well to exercise immediately. Keeping What you Got When you injure your lower body, try to keep your upper body exercises going. When you injure your upper body, try to keep your lower body exercises and stretching going. Yet jogging with a bad shoulder may irritate the shoulder. A bad knee may prevent you from easily handling your free-weight lifting program. Sometimes, as with my current foot injury, it is really easy to be distracted from my upper body program by the intense pain, general disability, and the resulting lack of sleep. It's easy for an injury to bring about a general decline in overall fitness. Try not to let this happen to you for both physical and psychological reasons. Broader Psychological and Physical Implications of Injury and Pain I find extended periods of inactivity characterized by extreme pain to be psychologically and physically daunting. Let's call intense pain an environment which makes it very "challenging" to maintain either a fitness program or sociability. Yet we have to enter society to obtain what we need. Exercise will help you preserve both your physical and psychological balance. I find that maintaining even part of my exercise program through the height of an injury's pain and disability helps provide a distraction from the monotony of pain through productive activity. It's also very important to keep it in mind that your road to recovery from a severe injury demands extended periods of pain and inactivity prior to physically re-engaging. It's the old "Pottery Barn" policy: you broke it, you bought it, and there's nothing you can do about it, so don't add any self-torture to the situation. Although you will have to terminate your fitness program for your injured parts for a while, it really helps to maintain the other elements of your fitness program you are still capable of doing. Give your injured parts time to heal When you have to glue your broken pieces back together you have to give the glue time to set. There will be time enough for work, activity, and backpacking after the required healing and diminishment of pain has taken place, and you can have faith that the pain will eventually diminish. The mind and body are an amazing thing, and they will both eventually work together to dull even the most terrific pain. These extended periods of extreme pain show us just how closely related the mind and body really are. Drug Plan Be very careful with the drugs. The narcotics are addictive, and quickly become ineffective when over-used. The anti-inflamatories come with a basket of cautions that you cannot disreguard. Ibroprofen can burn up your stomach, while Acetomicien is very hard on your liver. Be very careful with all drugs. Read the labels, stay below the daily dosage limits, and immediatly stop using them when the pain and inflamation receeds. We are initially using these drugs to help ourselves get working again, through the pain. As we continue to build our fitness we are going to work on reducing drug use. As we approach top conditioning we will be working towards reducing our drug use towards the goal of minimal drug use possible for the highest degree of fitness we are capable of. We will continue to use less drugs as we progress in the fitness program if things go well with the stretching and walking. Physically, the sedentary life caused by recovering from a long-duration serious injury radically de tunes your body. Maintaining even part of your exercise program through your injury will offset your loss of fitness to some extent and keep you from going stir-crazy. Hopefullly.
Offsetting the General Decay of Inactivity and Injury Your metabolism, heart and lungs, legs and upper body all begin to lose their edge of fitness while recovering from injury or during extended periods of inactivity. Muscle mass will diminish. Maintaining parts of your exercise program for your uninjured parts will help offset detuning your body, and provide a productive foundation and the basis of a schedule to begin building your injured parts back up to strength and flexibility. Fundamental walking and stretching are the foundations of fitness and backpacking. INTRODUCTION TO STRETCHING AND FLEXIBILITY
Next Video: Stretching Two, Up against the Wall The problems of a de tuned metabolism also applies to sedentary people beginning a training program. Add to that the weakness of your bones, connective tissues, and muscles along with the overall poor condition of your metabolism: everything is de-tuned. There is no reason to push any of these systems to extremes when beginning a program. As you start repairing and strengthening your injured parts you will also be bringing all of your body's dependent systems into play. This can be pretty exhausting. Don't push too hard or you will crash and burn, even if you don't suffer reinjury. To avoid these pitfalls we must establish a regular fitness program that can realistically achieve our goals. This means that we are in it for the long term. We are not just completing a few frenzied exercise sessions until we collapse into exhaustion, but we are ultimately building a schedule we can and will maintain long after recovering from our injury. This program is headed for the mountaintop.
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