Active Recovery and Injury Rehabilitation/Prevention

Every day does not need to be an extraordinarily difficult, balls-to-the-wall, superhero workout. Sometimes it’s good to take slow things down, and isolate the areas that need the most attention to prevent any serious injuries from arising. I’ve been nursing a few myself for over a month now. I’ve mentioned my right knee being a bit troublesome a.k.a. “a little bitch” and my right rotator cuff has been nagging me. I’ve been using lots of Tiger’s Balm, Biofreeze, and the sort on the shoulder. It has been improving however it still needs plenty of rehab exercises to strengthen it back to 100%. This became very evident to me while I was using a measly 5lb dumbell to do side and lateral raises as well as rotational movements. This along with some band exercises helped out a lot tonight. I’ve also mentioned before that I’ve been taking Innerzyme’s Pain & Inflammation Blend (review coming soon).

I also focused on my core/abdominal section tonight by doing 100 slow swiss ball sit-ups followed by 100 quick swiss ball sit-ups. A few other exercises I did included reverse bench press pull-ups. I’ll do my best to describe this incase its not clear, what I do is set the bar on my smith machine to a little higher than arm lengths away from the floor. I lay down and grab the bar and place my feet on a swiss ball. From there I lift my self up toward the bar keeping my entire body in a solid flat line. This works the back, arms and core. I did sets of these with wide grip, reverse grip, standard grip and close grip.

Another set of core exercises that I did was a series of Muay Thai kicks, grabs, and knee strikes. I find these movements are good for hitting a little bit of everything since you stay on your toes and involve most of your body in the movement.

The last set of core exercises were decline pushups. Simply place your feet onto a raised object and use push-up bars to give yourself an extra few inches of descent. [See attached images] The key here it to again keep very straight solid lines. You do not want to allow your ass to get all up in the air or to sag down low, squeeze your ass and your abs to prevent this.

Two last areas that I focused on were my wrists as well as my calves/shins. For the wrists I used 5lb weights to do a variety of movements in each direction. I did a few sets of each. Now for the calves ands shins, I was starting to feel the onset of a shin splint not too long ago, hence the lack of running lately, to help strengthen the surrounding muscles and prevent it from getting worse I have been doing lots of toe raises for the shins and calf raises to balance things out. With all exercises its about balance. This is no different. Tonight I did significantly more than normal over 150 each but something I very much want to stress do this stuff whenever you can. These are exercises you can do all the time almost anywhere. I try to do a the bare minimum a set of 30 each day.

Remember take care of your body… know when to take it easy and focus on some of the smaller areas that don’t always get as much attention as they should. Our bodies are very complex, we tend to get over zealous in developing all our primary muscles groups but we must remember that our joints, smaller muscles, ligaments and tendons all need to have time to strengthen and develop. So go out there grab some smaller weights or some bands and get to work! Oh and of course, don’t think I forgot the Holy Quadruplet of Rehabing, RICE, Rest, Ice, Compress, Elevate. Seriously that shit works. 🙂

One last thing…I swear, two words. Foam. Roller.