Fitness While Recovering From Injury – A Personal Reflection

Good day everyone. This is going to be more of a reflection piece than an informative article. As I’m writing this reflection piece, I’ve actually been battling injury for awhile. When I first started​ this blog, I wrote a piece on how to modify your lifestyle when illness or injury strikes. You can check it out here. My motivation for writing that piece came from an eight year old sebaceous cyst which was starting to get inflamed. It was the cause of much grief at that time, and culminated in its removal, which of course, was to be followed by a long recovery process.

That post focused on the measures I was going to put in place to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Two of the points that I focused on were altering my diet so that my calorie intake was lower, and also “keep the routine” of exercising, even if I was doing something that wasn’t specifically exercising. The rationale for the latter was that I wanted to keep that block of “exercise” time in my calendar, because I knew that if it was being replaced by something else, it might be difficult to adjust that time slot back to exercising.

Fast forward three years later and unfortunately the cyst problem hadn’t ended. It flared up once at the end of last year, and recently came up again with a vengeance. I was, and still am, on antibiotics. As for the physical side of things, I routinely squeeze the pus and gunk out myself. Painful it is, test my fortitude it does. I don’t know when it will fully be resolved, but I’ll first have to wait for the infection to clear. After that, I might undergo cyst removal surgery immediately, or do it after my upcoming holidays.

So why am I writing all this? It’s not to gain sympathy, for that does nothing for the situation I’m in. Rather, I’ll take this chance to reflect on the situation I’m in, and what I have done. Although I’m periodically in pain, and although my injury does prohibit me from undergoing even moderately vigorous exercise, I have stuck to my plan for the most part. Since my injury is not so debilitating that I can’t do any physical activity, I have been going to the gym everyday, as per my normal routine.

I’m not making this up. Every month, my gym collates the stats for their members and report on the top 10 members in terms of number of visits. I am usually in the top five, because the way I operate is that I will go to the gym unless I’m either away, or plagued by insomnia. In fact, I can keep track on the number of days each month I have severe insomnia by taking this number away from the number of days in that month. Anyway, here’s the proof:

(Keep in mind that my cyst started to cause problems at the start of June, or maybe at the end of May)

So, then, what have I been doing in the gym? Well, I have been either walking on the treadmill, using the elliptical, or going on the exercise bike. But the thing is that I have reduced my intensity greatly, with the difficulty levels being very low (On the treadmill I usually go at a pace of 5.5 km/h on an incline level of 8-ish – much lower than my usual intensity). Why do I do this? Because my exercise time is sacred. I may not be able to stick to my “default-intensity” routine for a few months, but hey, at least I’m doing something, right?

So, as I recover from that nasty piece of work, I would like to encourage you to not allow injury or illness to keep you down for too long. If you are really sick and can’t even do a simple workout, no worries! It’s not your fault for being sick. But don’t feel all helpless about it and allow yourself to slip into worse shape than you need to be in. Make some minor modifications to your diet and ‘quarantine’ your regular workout time to do something – even if it is reading. Maybe it’s reading my philosophy of having a strong mindset, a good diet and a proper workout program.  You can check all of it out in the Granite Fitness Masterclass:

Hope this has brought you some inspiration. Here’s to good health for us all – cheers!