Fuel Your Strength: Sports Injury Rehab and Returning to Lifting w/ Dr. Leada Malek

Key Takeaways

If You Want to Return To Lifting After an Injury, You Should:

Listen to pain as if it is a messenger and not a serious alarm
Try to move past your fear and anxiety by thinking happy thoughts
Work with a professional to find the right dosage and rate of exercise for your state

Getting Back to What You Love with Dr. Leada Malek

Dr. Leada Malek is a licensed physical therapist, board-certified sports specialist, and one of the 9% of therapists in the US who specialize in sports therapy. She has treated everyone from professional dancers to athletes, weekend warriors, and young adults. Dr. Malek uses a combined approach of manual therapy and therapeutic exercise to help her patients move better, perform better, and compete again. She believes in retraining the body as a whole and assisting people in preventing or recovering from injury so that they can continue to do what they love.

Treating the Whole Person

You may not think of yourself as an athlete, but Dr. Malek believes that you are one if you are doing something that you love. When an injury happens, it can prevent us from doing these activities; and it can profoundly impact our mental health, immune system, hormones, sleep, and mood.

Dr. Malek likes to get to know and treat a person as a whole being. Knowing what drives you, your fears, and your strengths can help identify an injury and prevent any future injuries. Addressing your thoughts and beliefs around your injury can actually help you resolve your pain and give you the confidence to get back into lifting again.

Get Past Your Fear and Back Into the Gym

Sometimes an injury or simply getting older can make us question our ability to build strong muscles and strong bones. But Dr. Malek is here to tell you that your body is incredibly resilient, and with the right dosage and right rate of exercise, your body can adapt, and you can take baby steps towards doing what you love again.

Pain is not always a sign of injury, but it does need to be listened to. By paying attention to what your body is trying to tell you, and focusing on the exercises and movement patterns that make you feel the best, you can address all the things that go into making you a functioning human, and move past your injury in the best way possible.

Are you ready to address your fears around rehabbing your injury and get back to lifting? Share your thoughts with me in the comments section of the episode page.

In This Episode

Common issues that athletes deal with, even at a high level of performance in contrasting arenas (10:02)
The role of low energy availability and how it can impact how you train (14:49)
Physical manifestations that can come from low energy availability when recovering (20:56)
What to do if you are afraid or skeptical to start lifting again after an injury (24:42)
How to know how much mobility is right for you (34:20)

Quotes

“Once I got in and really started to appreciate how you could use exercise to help someone continue to exercise despite their ability to not exercise, that was really cool to me.” (7:14)

“It may not show up in hormonal levels, or maybe it is, and you just can't see it, but it can show up in your mood, in sleep disturbances, in immune function.” (20:24)

“Not every question that you ask the person may be about the injury, but every question you ask should be about them. What they think, what they believe, how they view their injury, what scares them or what excites them, and what they want to be able to do. Because if you have all that information, and they are having an off day because of something else, you might catch something at a very early stage that could save them from a future injury.” (23:11)

“You should be able to complete everything you want to do without the looming fear of ‘this is going to injure me again’. Because your body is super resilient.” (27:24)

“There is someone out there that is dedicated to making sure that you understand your body in the sense that is going to offer the way of exercising for longevity, and that doesn't hinder your progress.” (29:39)