Injury workaround

[thatgirljj]

Rebels, I need your help! I stepped on a rather good sized piece of glass today, and while the ER sent me on my way with just a tetanus shot, clearly I'm not going to be bearing weight on my right foot for a week or so. The laceration is on my heel, so I can kind of hobble about, but my typical workouts are going to be on hold. So... anyone have any good suggestions?

My typical workout routine is usually about 3 hours a week of circus aerials (mostly upper body, but not anything I can do safely on my foot quite yet), and another 2-4 hours of vigorous yoga, flexibility & bodyweight training. My cardio is pretty piddly, mostly going on family walks a few times a week where my budding fitness trainer son yells at me to "run with me mommy!" I have access to a pretty downmarket gym, they have a lot of the basics, but no fancy arms-only bikes or anything like that.

My short term goal would be to maintain my upper body strength and counter the calorie/depression effects of laying around on the couch not being able to walk anywhere. Can anyone suggest a basic upper body strength routine I can do 2-3 times a week? Any ideas for non-weight-bearing cardio? I think I can adapt my yoga around this, but the rest of my workouts have me at a loss.

-jj

[esteel]

First i'd say, hell a week of non-training might even be good and give your (lower) body a really good recovery and is nothing to worry about! A week is not enough to really loose muscle mass or fitness. In that time maybe your body even fully adjusts to the last workout you had and you will turn out stronger after that week. Would not be the first time this happend.

On the other hand if you really feel bad about it and like to continue some lowerbody work how about trying some of those machines in the gym? Leg extention and Leg curls.. calve raises, hyperextentions. They are quite handy if you are injured!

[shiggles]

I agree a week is nothing really. Either take the chance to have a bit of rest and be ready to jump back into things or take the time to experiment a bit.

Personally I would go to the gym and muck around with all the different machines. Sure someone could give you a program, but you are only going to follow it for a week so there's not much point. Normally for a program you need to find some sort of baseline to start with and that will take a few workouts i.e. a week to figure out confidently. Regarding exercises if you need something to try, just stick to the basics, bench press, shoulder press, dumbell flys, reverse flys and rows. You should be able to find variations of those where you are sitting of lying down that suit.

Also regarding cardio, don't forget the bikes. If the wound is on your heel you might be able to manage as when cycling you should aim to contact the pedal with the ball of your foot.

[thatgirljj]

Thanks.... Shiggles, the bike is a good idea. And wandering around randomly mucking around isn't that bad of an idea since it's basically short term cross training.

Esteel, sadly, I was just finishing up taking a week break from hard training because I pulled something in my leg, so adding on another week starts to feel lazy. And I'm still not quite sure whether it will be a week or 3 weeks before I can train fully again. The people in the ER were pretty vague and told me to ask my regular doctor when I see her on Monday. They were kind of like "I dunno... you didn't need stitches but feet sometimes take a lot of time."

I feel like variations of this question have been asked a bunch, maybe every month or so... maybe we should start a guide for training while injured.

-jj