The Consequences of Too Much Rest After an Injury

If you get injured, it can be difficult to determine how to properly rest after the injury occurs. Popular belief is to rest until you have fully recovered from the injury.  However, there are consequences to doing nothing but resting for a long period.  A balance of rest with light activity is much more effective for your recovery.

Is There Such Thing as Too Much Rest?

Rest is very important for recovery.  Regardless of how active your lifestyle may be, when an injury occurs, everyone needs time to rest before they start picking up any exercises that can put too much stress on the injury.  Resting is a crucial step to healing your injury and feeling better. However, too much rest can cause your body to weaken.  This can lead to even more injuries once you try going back to your regular routine.

How do I Prevent my Body from Weakening during Rest?

Your body starts to weaken because there is no demand for exercise.  Your body knows when you have stopped a workout regimen and quickly begins to adjust itself to the level of activity that is demanded.  To prevent this, one must keep the body active enough so that you aren’t irritating the injury and concurrently keeping your body active. Light exercise that keeps your body active without putting too much stress on your injury is highly recommended.

Exercises you may want to consider include:

• Light walking

• Swimming

• Yoga

• Thermal workouts

Once your injury has healed, you can start doing more demanding workouts, but until then, do not put extreme strain on the body.

Should I Avoid Exercises that Directly Impact my Injury?

When you suffer from an injury, avoiding the use of that body part is a natural reaction.  If it hurts, why irritate it?  There are some injuries where the body part must be left alone to heal.  However, the prolonged rest of a certain body part increases the risk of it being injured again because it has become weak.  Therefore, physical therapy is often recommended by orthopedic doctors and physicians.

Working with a physical therapist helps diagnose exactly how the injury is affecting your range of motion and daily movements.  The physical therapist works closely with you to create a personalized workout routine.  The exercises assigned to you help strengthen the necessary areas around your injury to speed up recovery and prevent future injury.

 Physical Therapy is not only about treating an existing injury but preventing future ones.  If you are feeling any pain or irritation and want to make sure you don’t injure yourself, seeing a physical therapist for body part strengthening exercises.  These preventative exercises can keep your body in a strong, healthy state, and most importantly, injury-free.

Moriarty Physical Therapy is a premier PT center in the Hudson Valley. To find out more about physical therapy or to book your first appointment with a PT, contact Moriarty Physical Therapy at (845) 454-4137 or visit their website.