Sometimes body injuries happen outside our control that come and go. And when you’re slightly injured, say with a common sprain, you can still do light work around home workouts being careful, and then gradually restoring back to regular exercising and good fit health routines.
For a light strain or sprain, you can be out for a few weeks before you’re back to regular activities. If you have a more serious injury, it can be a few months before you’re mobile, and that’s when you may want to come up with a different strategy so the rest of your healthy body doesn’t have to wait. It’s easy to get out of a regular workout routine with a good excuse!
…I want to encourage you to keep doing home exercises year-round no matter what (unless your doctor tells you not to or you’re sick), as your mental health and happiness improve — a fact we all know about the happy hormones and endorphins that release in working out.
As you get the blood circulating into your brain and body, you gain more energy from working out and that can help you sleep and eat healthier. If you have a foot sprain injury, for example, you could still do simple arm exercises to keep moving (a good body goal to maintain).
With common inflammation, you probably know it’s good to rest and ice your injury first, which can take a few days or weeks (everyone is different).
If you’re an athlete, you’re usually less fragile as your body is strong compared to someone who doesn’t work out as often.
In either case, when you’re back on the road to body recovery, you can think about strengthening other body parts. You don’t want to not do any exercise for weeks waiting for your sprain to heal completely if you can, so you can stay strong (and not get weak) both overall mentally and physically.
Physical therapy (exercises) exists, so you can rehabilitate your overall body and health back to your norm or stronger than before your injury.
If you think about it, when you do regular daily activities like brushing your teeth, cooking, or cleaning, you still need miracle muscle strength to do those common tasks. We underestimate the need for muscles unless we don’t have the ability to do what we need to do.
Even though our muscles are adaptable, we want to create progressive muscle growth, especially in our large muscle groups like our legs, buttocks, arms, and upper body so we can be independent to lift, walk, and pull or push even daily light weighted things.
Ok cool.. all makes sense so far, right?
Below I share a few of my favorite exercises, sprain injured or not, for staying toned and getting some cardio in even if you have light limitations, such as a common foot sprain.
We all have some personal fitness goals even if we don’t believe in writing resolutions. One of mine is staying the same consistent size, proportions, and weight. Since I’ve been the same size for years, measuring is not necessary but if I were trying to lose or gain weight, then measuring would be more accurate and a way to determine if what I was doing, was working.
Another goal is staying toned (or sculpted which sounds like a muscular statue). This is good no matter what your weight is… it’s obvious if you’re toned or not from a mirror, so you don’t have to step on a scale.
The tone goal is good for most women because if you’re serious about achieving good tone, you will naturally do the things in between or in the process to make that happen, like eat less and do more pushups.
Remember the “7 Habits of Highly Effective People”? – the second habit is “begin with the end in mind,” which is good for any goal setting you do. (I’m having a déjà vu moment right now where I can picture Stephen Covey who wrote the 7 habits. I was in a class of his decades ago where he taught his principles… I digress)…
For most of us, the easiest exercises are compound exercises whether you have a sprain, another injury, or are beginning workouts again from a hiatus. Compound exercises are good for all-around working out multiple joints and muscles. If you’re limber or pretty ok with yoga, you’re likely to be good at most compound exercises.
An example would be a squat, which I like to call moving chair poses (yogi-language). One of my faves is what I call the folding chair (another made-up yoga pose name) or the Hindu squat (real exercise name) that I describe further below.
If you’re injured you want to be careful with gym equipment and machines that can complicate your workouts. Opt for free or no weights to avoid further injury. You also want to do fewer sets at the beginning and more reps with light or no weights (e.g. holding 8 oz water bottles or stress balls in each hand as placeholders if you’re used to holding weights).
At some point, you can gradually add back the weights you were training at for good resistance and progressive strength building.
Using the foot sprain injury example, working out parts of your upper leg can still put pressure on your foot, so you want to be very careful about your delicate injury.
You may want to go for a few isolation exercises at first to purposefully avoid your injured healing areas, targeting says your arms or upper body while your foot is gaining strength day by day.
If your main goal is to lose weight, injured or not, one strategy is you can eat less to bring in fewer calories, which is not always easy when you’re injured or stuck on the couch.
An alternative is cardio that you may want to avoid if injured. It’s also often overrated for losing weight because most people add back those calories and hidden calories in the food they consume that exceed the calories lost from cardio workouts.
So, if you’re injured you can find other ways more easily effective.
Staying active with light resistance training, and using controlled, resistance bands can be a better strategy. And in the foot healing and mending meanwhile, you can opt to do some floor, standing, and chair exercises where your feet are on the ground.
You can do some yoga stretching poses where you can see the tops of your feet I recommend, so your gaze is on your feet, like in seated side angle (also called hurdle stretch) where no pressure is put on your toes or feet.
…Especially if you have Vata mind tendencies, it’s too easy to forget about your injured area when you get caught up in the moment… while that’s good for mindfulness, if you can’t see the injured body part, you can suddenly add stress to your injury, when it can be a wee too late.
Foot strains are on muscles and tendons and sprains on ligaments that can take longer to heal. As a reminder always bandage those areas so you don’t have a careless moment in your busy day. It never hurts to play it safe!
Here are a few additional full-body workouts and exercises that you can benefit from with an injured foot strain, sprain, or foot blister:
Abdominal Situps where your legs are raised in the air the entire time and you can see them (not on the floor) when you’re crunching down. Your knees will be slightly bent.
Cardio, Legs, and Buttocks (largest muscle group) – Work out your buttocks and thighs with Hindu squats. You can start with the invisible chair, also called the chair pose in yoga. When you have a physical chair that you sit on, the actual chair would remove the physical workout. But when you take away the chair, then you have a workout with your leg muscles and buttocks that holds up the rest of your body. Easy, right?
Sit in your invisible or imaginary yoga chair pose with your arms out straight in front of you, and parallel to each other. Then curl in your fingers and turn your hands so thumbs are up toward the ceiling like you’re about to take off as an astronaut.
Then you can take your arms by your side and rotate them in a 360-degree/circular motion forward, coming up slightly from your invisible chair so you feel it mostly in your butt and upper leg muscles. Keep doing this. I like to do 3 sets of 10 reps. You can do this while you’re waiting for water to boil or your food to cook.
Arms – Build strong arms so you can lift, push, and pull things. Another one I like to practice is the one-legged plank (leaning all your body weight on your good leg/foot and arms – on your 3’s, not all 4’s). If you hurt one side only, you can isolate that part and lean 100% on your healthy side for strength and balance.
I also call this the one-legged pushup. This helps test your balance and flexibility and this is how you can come up with creative yoga poses that are good for your workouts! As long as you feel you’re comfortably working healthy muscles, you’re doing your body good.
If you have a foot sprain and miss the Downward Dog pose, mainly for arms, you can try the 3-legged Dog where you lift your healing leg gently into the air (just be sure not to point too tight).
So, don’t give up on your yoga passion as your body cells remember the moves and when you’re ready, your body will be re-energized to do the poses you once did and maybe with greater balance since you’ve been given enough rest time.
And if arms are one of your strength areas, you also want to keep high muscle maintenance elsewhere and move on working out other weaker parts so you can more evenly distribute your strength.
You uniquely have body strengths and you know what they are, and you can play those up (but work on other smaller muscles too in case you need them like for an injury or Side Angle pose if for no other reason)!
Have you ever noticed in yoga how one ‘lil adjustment or turn can feel different in your body (because a different side of the main muscle is being stressed in a good way)? You may not notice this as much if you’ve been doing yoga for a while, but we all remember our humble pasts when a graceful side-angle pose was not so easy to maintain for a long time.
If you’ve been in yoga classes you’ve probably seen this phenomenon before when there was a man or two in the class. For their side-angle poses, you saw the arm propping them up, start to wobble in weakness because they’re using a side of the bicep-tricep muscles they don’t use in common everyday ways like lifting heavy objects or in a plank pose. You can never exactly tell by looking at someone what they can do in yoga.
I’m a thin-framed woman and no one would ever describe me as muscular or athletic, but I’m pretty sure I can take the challenge of Jennifer Aniston’s 10-minute plank. The bigger challenge for a Vata mind is not getting bored and wanting to do other tasks while waiting for time 😉.
On that note, what fun and safe challenges can you come up with for yourself? I hope I’ve inspired you with a new pose or exercise.