Rebellion Week 2 – coping with injury

I strained my calf in the last 600m of the Nike Women’s 10K run last weekend. It was a pretty frustrating thing to happen and slightly ironic that in my first ‘proper’ race since recovering from my hip injury that I managed to injure something else. Is someone trying to tell me something about running?!

I was particularly frustrated because I’m in just the second week of Julia Buckley’s new fat loss programme and I had got all fired up about making some real progress. I’d loved the first week and was raring to go for the second. And then there I was limping home on Sunday lunchtime wondering what I’d done and how much of my training was going to be affected.

I did all the right things. Icing, compression, elevation and staying off it as much as possible. On Monday I went to work in trainers with a compression sleeve under my trousers. Same on Tuesday. Wednesday morning I saw my osteopath/masseur who diagnosed a soleus strain – did some massage and acupuncture and gave me the very good news that it should heal up in a week, as long as I was careful. Being careful basically meant avoiding anything that was going to put strain on the calf – on the downside no running, jumping about, lunging, cycling, definitely no Olympic Lifting, on the upside no burpees.

On the one hand I was relieved that it was only a strain and should heal quickly. On the other hand I was still frustrated that it was potentially going to affect my training. I wanted to carry on with Rebellion but quite a lot of the moves were out of the question. What to do?

Over the last few years I’ve had a number of different injuries and I’ve learned that there’s almost always something that you can still do. My calf was out of action but my upper body was functioning perfectly normally, so I drew up a schedule for this week picking workouts that were upper body focussed or where I knew I could modify moves to make them suitable.

And here we now are on Saturday afternoon and I’ve completed a full week of workouts. Some of them weren’t quite as intense as they would have been had I been fully fit, but I’ve set some new PBs on tricep kickbacks and back flyes so am feeling pretty good about that!

My calf has been feeling much better so today I tested it out with some rowing intervals and it seems to have coped well. If it’s still all feeling OK by Monday then I’ll start to try out some other things and see how it goes. I’m not going to push it, there would be nothing more frustrating than to set it off again, but if it’s feeling better I’ll start to test it out a bit more.

The fact that I’ve been able to mix up my training like this is a testament to the flexibility of the Rebellion programme and everything I’ve learned from training over the last few years. It’s feels great to be in a place where I can modify moves on my own or think of other exercises to substitute in if I need to.

It’s absolutely possible to train around an injury – you’ve just got to be creative!

Todays training session – Sculpt, Shred and Sustain