I’m Injured…Can I Still Stretch?

Is it safe to stretch when you’re injured? I’m sorry to say that there isn’t an easy answer to this question! Since every body is different, and every injury is different, it’s hard to give a blanket statement about stretching when injured. But let’s take a look at some scenarios that may help you decide to train or not to train.

Before I jump off into giving advice her, please note that I always recommend contacting your medical professional (PT, MD, Osteopath, Chiro etc.) when an injury occurs, and do not continue training or stretching the injured area until it has been assessed.

Now, let’s say that you overstretched one of you hamstring muscles, and you had it assessed. Can you actually keep stretching that muscle? Most likely, if you continue to stretch the injured muscle, it will take longer to heal. But, you absolutely should keep stretching other areas while you rehab the injured hamstring. Yes, you’ll most likely need to do some rehab exercises, hence the advice for medical attention!

As you are working around the injury and doing your rehab, you will get to a point in your recovery that it feels ok to start stretching that area again. A good rule of thumb to know if you are actually moving forward and not making things worse is how the injury feels the next day. If you tried some stretching or mobility work and it hurts like hell the next day, that was too much. It may mean that the exercise(s) you did were directly affecting the injured muscle or muscle groups.

At this point you may need to take a step back and reassess where you are at in your healing process. I know it feels as if you will never get back to where you were in your flex journey, but believe me, you will. It may just take a while to get there.

The key to recovering from an injury is patience! I hope this help

If you have any questions about training around an injury, you can contact me at fran@bodybyfrantraining.com or @bodybyfran on Instagram!