Hello everyone

I hope everyone is well.

In my last lock I wrote about my recent injury and how I am recovering from this. This blog is pretty much an update on how this is going.

Mental health is really important, and just as important as our physical health. Our mental health is less visible but it’s still really important. With this current injury at times I am limping, which is a very obvious sign that I have an injury. What you don’t see is how this physical manifestation quit cause pain and severe damage to my mental health.

In the first block I wrote about this injury, I talked about my physical recovery and how I plan to just keep moving. But my recovery here is not just physical. My mental health has taken a significant hit from this injury. Physical and mental health go together as one. You cannot take a hit in one area without some level of impact in the other.

Exercise is a significant part of how I keep my mental health on a level and I generally look after myself. Exercise helps me keep my calm, it boosts my happiness and to help keep my head clear. Without this I know from past experience my mental health will take a severe hit.

So whilst I talked about my physical recovery from this injury, I have accounted for my mental health with the same degree of importance. I’ve planned out keeping active and mitigation as I don’t know how long this injury will take to recover from.

I’ll just touch on the logistics to give you a picture and an example. With my exercise routine running formed one of two high intensity cardio workouts that I do will stop now that running is no longer an option, and may remain so for the foreseeable future I needed to mitigate this. I do have a home gym with quiet love equipment but this limitations particularly on the cardio side. To help with my recovery and more from a mental health perspective, I have temporarily joined the local gym at the leisure centre. This has given me access to different cardio equipment that I wouldn’t have space for at home. This is keeping me active in replacement of running.

This new gym membership, whilst temporary, is for my mental health more than anything. One of the joys of running for me is how it helps me get out of the house, how I can push myself a little and go other places. Whilst this might sound quite simplistic it’s really good for mental health. I can achieve quite a bit of this through walking, but I also enjoy the push I get through running. By joining the gym, temporarily, I at least have an established place to go to that can be a centre for mental health.

So when we think of exercising, and in particular recovering from an injury we do tend to focus on the physical manifestation that has. For me the mental impact is just as important. I am grateful but from the last four years everything I’ve learned helped me quickly act to ensure both areas of my health are factored into my plans. And I am pleased that my mental health is still on a level where I feel it should be okay.

I always  say it is OK not to be OK, and I still the case here. Not everything is okay, but what I am grateful for is being able to work through this positively.

Hopefully my plan will work, if not I will reassess.

For now, happy exercising everyone.