How do I exercise with a hurt ankle/foot/leg?

Question:

I hurt my ankle/foot. How do I continue on plan while this heals?

Short Answer:

First of all, we are sorry to hear about your injury or issue! Injuries are always part of the game when it comes to being active but are well-worth the risk compared to the many health dangers of being inactive or living an unhealthy lifestyle. Luckily, there are still ways to make progress, despite this setback.

Longer Answer:

Remember that your nutrition and hydration play 80% of the role in this journey anyway. You can still make fantastic progress if you watch your consumption habits and may even help expedite the healing process with cleaner foods! So if you are finding yourself completely unable to move, watching your intake becomes even more important as your daily metabolic burn will be lower as well. But if you are able to exercise check out this sample below.

Unfortunately, we are going to have to miss out on a lot of larger body-part, more explosive movements. Those are the real calorie-burners but it's probably not feasible putting weight or pressure on your ankle/foot right now. Instead, we will focus on more traditional strength training for your upper body. Now the most dangerous part of this is the transitional periods: "racking" of the weights, loading them to your start position, moving from exercise to exercise, etc. As long as you can navigate through that, the actual lifting portion should be OK.

• DB Bench Press (3 sets x 8-10 reps)
• DB Bench Row (3 sets x 8-10 reps)
• DB Shoulder Press (3 sets x 8-10 reps)
• DB Incline Curls (3 sets x 10-12 reps)
• DB Skull Crushers (3 sets x 10-12 reps)
• Lying Leg Raises (3 x failure)

If you wanna stay in that metabolic/Apex-style range, use lighter weight but keep rest times to 30-45sec between sets. If looking to work on more muscle maintenance and/or are worried about the transitional portion between sets, you can use heavier weight, and rest time should be about 60-90sec between sets. But hopefully, this can work out for you until you get the clearance from your doctor to do more. But at the end of the day, please be careful if attempting to exercise during this time...it's not worth setting yourself back even further with re-injury! 

Yours in Health & Friendship,

- The Fit Father Project

Customer Success Team