Staying in Shape While Injured

On Tuesday I wrote a post about how I was going to get back at going to the gym hard, eating clean and recording my meals all the time, and posting here regularly again.

Unfortunately the next day (Wednesday) I got injured playing in my Men’s League Hockey playoff game.

WARNING: If you don’t like blood don’t look at the picture coming up. It isn’t too bad but if you really don’t like seeing blood you can skip the picture.

It was basically a freak accident while playing hockey, but a guy on the other teams stick nailed me right in the mouth and across my top and bottom teeth. Right when it happened I knew that I had at least one tooth chipped, and then a few seconds later I realized there were at least two or more chipped or knocked out when I saw them on the ice.

I picked up the two teeth I did see on the ice and told the refs to look for any others as I skated off and to my dressing room. The blood was pretty bad although thankfully it was mostly from my lip. I went to the hospital and while waiting to see a doctor I had been in contact with a dentist. Since the cut on my lip didn’t need stitches I was trying to get in to see a dentist right away. Thankfully the dentist my mom works for is awesome and opened up his office for me, came in with his assistant, and started working away at my teeth within just an hour of first contacting him.

I was lucky to get in to see him and it ended up that I chipped three bottom teeth (two about half or 3/4 of the way down) and my top front tooth got knocked out of position. He snapped the top one back and fixed the bottom two. I have to go in to see him in a few weeks and get the teeth worked on further as well.

Check out the picture of the accident….

One of my first thoughts was that I won’t be able to play hockey for a few weeks, and I probably won’t be able to workout for a bit either. Both of those really suck as I just started a new supplement stack and with the warm weather coming was really excited to get going hard at the gym again.

I’m not sure how long I have to wait before going back in the gym, but I know it will be awhile until I can lift heavy weights. My teeth are very sensitive right now and when you lift heavy weights you tend to bite down hard which would not be good.

I’ve got to find a way to stay in reasonable shape until I can back into the gym hard and it’s going to be tough. The first part is the eating as I can’t really eat any solid foods right now. Yesterday the day after I had the dental work done (which went until 1:00 am) I went out and bought some soft foods to eat. I’m going to have to try to stick with mostly healthy stuff including protein shakes and juicing since I won’t be able to workout much.

As far as working out once I’m off the painkillers in a day or so I should be able to at least do cardio. I might throw in some light band work to start, and then I will see when I can actually lift some weights (but it will have to very light).

It is always tough to stay in shape when injured but there are ways around it. Eating healthy is a must if you want to keep from gaining any fat since you probably won’t be too physical (depending on your injury I guess). Other than eating it is all about trying to stay somewhat active and again that will depend on your injury. I’m lucky I didn’t suffer a concussion or anything like that as that would require pretty much no physical activity for a while. Leg injuries are another tough injury to try and stay in shape with as it pretty much takes you away from walking and usually leads to a lot of sitting or laying around.

I guess I’m pretty lucky that my injury wasn’t worse (my teeth could have been fully knocked out) and I can keep busy and hopefully ease my way back into working out soon. I’ll give some progress updates within any upcoming posts. I’ve got a few supplements to review that I may get to over the weekend or early next week since I won’t be doing too much.