The Martial Artist’s tips to keeping fit when injured

When you spend your life trying to reach and maintain a high standard of health and fitness, sustaining an injury could cause you to lose all hope. Suffering an injury can put you back months if you’re not careful, and to be a top martial artist, you should try not slip into the rut of laziness. If you don’t keep to some sort of regime while injured, you will struggle to get back to your fitness level once healed, and the dream of being a professional martial artist will be further away. So here are a few tips on how to keep fit with certain injuries. Just remember to warm-up, warm-down and stretch.

Knee injuries

A knee injury can be very painful and trying to protect the knee while maintaining your fitness is going to be tricky. Try not to over exert it, it has been said that sometimes cycling can help an injury and sometimes it can aggravate it. Stick to upper body exercises, crunches of all kinds, weight lifting while seated, you will benefit from water exercises too. Focus on keeping your core strong, this will help you get back into the rhythm of things when your knee is finally healed. Great for the core is the infamous plank, you might need to keep the pressure off the injured knee, but planks allow for many variations. Pull-ups, pulldowns, canoeing and upper body cycling are all forms of exercises that can be done with a knee or leg injury.

Wrist injuries

A sore wrist can be very frustrating, for obvious reasons, especially when you are trying to exercise. Martial Arts are contact sports in which you use your hands and arms to execute blows to your opponent. You can’t do push-ups and you may be a little bit worried about using weights, so try to focus on swimming, lunges, crunches, cycling and especially planks as most of your weight will be on your elbows and lower arms rather than on your wrists.

Shoulder injuries

Injuring your shoulder is one of the worst pains to endure. Once injured, it’s hard to heal especially if you keep exerting it. If your doctor tells you to rest it, trust him and don’t push it, a torn muscle under the shoulder blade can be very hard to heal. Luckily with a hurt shoulder, you can still utilise your legs, go for a walk or a jog, even a little treadmill cardio is great to get your heart beating and blood pumping. Aqua aerobics, or even just treading water, will be great, but concentrate on keeping the tender arm protected.

Try to maintain 60 minutes of activity a week, exercising with an injury is not going to be easy but have fun with it, be creative, be patient and don’t frown upon the basic exercises they are a stepping stone to martial art greatness. Most importantly though, chat to your doctor and make sure you’re not going to do more damage.