It’s always hard to step away from your regular exercise routine after you’ve encountered an injury or illness. However, you mustn’t take this a drawback, but an opportunity to rest and recover your body. Sometimes, our minds can’t take in all the information our bodies send us, so we tend to overestimate ourselves and push the limits harder than we can manage. 

For this not to happen, it’s important to take things slow and have a recovery plan. Follow these steps to a full recovery, and keep in mind that it doesn’t matter how fast you get there, it’s the ride that counts, so you should try to enjoy it as much as possible.

Listen to your body 

No pain no gain is a motto that isn’t going to do you any good in this case. There are different types of pain, and if you have ever had an extreme training session, you know the difference between this pain and the one that comes from injury. Strong, spiking and intense pain is the one that you should be worried about.

If you experience this type of pain in your injured spot when working out, you should stop immediately. This pain is an alarm that your body triggers, telling you that it’s being hurt. It’s extremely important that you listen to these signals during your after-recovery exercise, because your body is now very sensitive and fragile. In case of any environmental illness, you should be especially careful not to make this state even worse. 

Forget about your regular routine

No, you can’t do a hundred push-ups in a row after two weeks with flu. Your regular routine should be forgotten the minute you start recovering. It might seem like a personal failure, but it’s impossible to continue advancing all the time without stagnation periods and drawbacks. Once you start exercising again, remember that your body has suffered enough, so don’t try to torture it even further. 

Don’t run to the gym right away, but start with exercising at home. You need quality fitness equipment, and you should look for balance training aids, cardio bikes or treadmills, and also some weights will come in handy. This is a recovery starter kit, because you need to boost your cardio, strength and balance first, before you go back to CrossFit or other intensive workouts.

Don’t push your limits

A comfort zone is a beautiful place where nothing grows, but you are not in a state in which you can afford yourself to grow. It’s completely okay to be injured and sick and take the time to recover. Don’t listen to that eager voice in your head telling you to get back to the gym as soon as possible, but prolong your resting period as much as you need. If you are a keen sports person, you definitely don’t have to worry about getting lazy and never going back to the gym again. 

Your limits are extremely lowered after an injury or illness. This means that you are not aware of how much you can take anymore, and thus you should stay in the realm of comfort for the first week or two. Any excess harm you cause to your body can be an introduction into another long recovery period. Keep this in mind before going straight for those heavy weights.

Consult a doctor

If you are not sure how much you can take, there are people that can disambiguate this for you. Always, without any exception, visit a doctor when you seek advice for the best recovery. Physical therapists can give you a step-by-step personalized recovery plan and also provide you with a complete muscular evaluation. Physicians can discover all of your weak spots and your strengths and precisely tell you what you are ready to do now, what you will be ready to do in two weeks, and what you shouldn’t do in any case. 

Sometimes injuries can be detrimental to the point where you won’t be able to do the things you once enjoyed very much. Don’t take this as a failure, because you can always discover new sports, new kinds of exercise and new equipment that you can enjoy. Every closed door opens a new one.