How Does Personal Training Work With Injuries?

Personal training with an injury works when your trainer knows two things: how to keep you moving without making things worse, and when to hand you off to someone else. Get either one wrong and you either stall your recovery or set it back.

At Atom Athletics we train clients through sore shoulders, cranky low backs, rolled ankles and everything in between, whether that’s in your home, in your condo gym or at one of our partner studios. Here’s how we decide what to do, how much pain is acceptable, and what you should look for in a personal trainer if you’re working through an injury.

What a personal trainer can and can’t do for an injury

Personal trainers are often asked to be everything at once: coach, nutritionist, therapist. A great trainer understands that rehabilitation technically falls outside our scope. Our job is to keep you strong and moving safely around an injury, and to work alongside the people who treat it.

If you’re currently injured, a personal trainer shouldn’t be the first person you call. In almost every case, it never hurts to get an opinion from a practitioner who specializes in injuries. Here’s how we rank them for movement-based recovery:

• Athletic therapist: our top choice, because their training is built around getting people back to sport and activity.
• Physiotherapist: an excellent option for assessment and a structured rehab plan.
• Chiropractor: helpful when their treatment includes movement and exercise, not only manipulations.

We have practitioners we trust and refer clients to. If you already have your own physio, we ask to be included on an email with them. Clients often struggle to relay the details of their recovery plan, and a direct line keeps everyone working toward the same goal.

How we decide whether to train around an injury

The first thing we want to know is how long it’s been going on. That single detail shapes almost everything else. From there, the type of injury tells us how much we can handle on our own.

Long-standing or recurring injuries

If the pain has been there for a while, or it’s an old injury that was never properly dealt with and keeps coming back, we refer you to a practitioner. Something that keeps returning needs a proper assessment, not another round of guessing.

New aches and flare-ups

For a fresh ache, we usually train around it for about a week and see whether it settles. Short bouts of inflammation are common and often calm down on their own. We’re careful not to overreact here. Treating a minor flare-up like a serious injury can convince someone their body is more fragile than it is.

Muscle strains

Strains are the easiest injuries to work with and often don’t need any outside treatment. We scale things back with:

• Lighter weights
• Slower tempos, so each rep takes longer
• Higher reps, usually 15 to 20, to increase blood flow to the area

Tendinopathies

We can train clients with tendon issues, like a sore shoulder or elbow tendon, but we prefer to have recommendations from a physiotherapist first. Tendons respond well to the right loading, and a physio’s guidance helps us get that right.

Tears, sprains and traumatic injuries

For torn tendons or ligaments, sprains and other traumatic injuries, we must have clearance from a physiotherapist before we train the area.

How much pain is okay during a personal training session?

We err on the side of caution. Our goal is to find exercise variations and joint angles that cause no pain at all. That takes some trial and error, and occasionally a movement will hurt. When it does, we stop immediately and try something else.

Our pain scale, adjusted to you

Some low-level pain can be tolerable, especially when your physiotherapist is encouraging you to work through it. As a general rule, we say a 3 out of 10 or less is manageable.

But people experience pain differently, so we adjust that number to the person in front of us:

• If you’re more sensitive to pain, we might set your limit at 4 out of 10.
• If you’re the hard-nosed type who insists nothing ever hurts, we drop it to 1 or 2 out of 10.

Both adjustments are aiming at the same thing: what we’d consider a true 3 out of 10.

Using isometrics to ease pain

An isometric is an exercise where your muscle works hard without your joint moving. Think of a wall sit, a plank, or pushing against an immovable object and holding. Isometrics can have an analgesic effect, which means they can temporarily blunt pain. That makes them a useful tool for training an injured area with less discomfort while it recovers.

Case study: Taso’s rolled ankle

Taso is a busy entrepreneur who rolled his ankle playing tennis. We recommended he see a physiotherapist, but between running his business, his other responsibilities and his training sessions, he found it hard to fit in the appointments. So we kept things conservative and built his training around what his ankle could tolerate.

Weeks 1 to 4: calm it down

Squats were his biggest problem. His ankle handled the load fine at the top of the movement, but near the bottom, where the ankle bends the most, it hurt. So we added chains to the bar. As you lower into a squat, the chains pile up on the floor, which takes weight off the bar. At the bottom, Taso was lifting nearly half what he had at the top. He kept training his legs without loading the ankle in its most painful position.

We also made a few other changes:

• Slow single-leg calf raises, focusing on the lowering phase, to increase blood flow and strengthen the joint
• No jumping of any kind
• Incline walking on the treadmill in place of higher-impact conditioning

Week 4 and beyond: build it back

After about four weeks his ankle was feeling much better. We started adding low-level plyometrics, small and controlled hops and jumps, to rebuild the ankle’s tolerance to impact. The goal wasn’t just to get him pain-free. It was to make his ankle more resilient so it’s less likely to happen again when he’s back on the court.

That’s the approach in a nutshell: find a variation that works for you while things settle, then gradually rebuild what the injury took away.

Rebuilding confidence when you’re afraid to move

After an injury, many people start avoiding anything that might hurt: bending, lifting, exercise altogether. We get it. Our job is to show you that you can still get stronger without putting the injury at risk.

One or two tries per session

We explain that the goal is finding new movements that avoid pain but still strengthen your body. To keep that process low-stress, we only test one or two variations in a session. If neither works, we leave the area alone for the day and focus on other body parts and goals. You’ll never be pushed into a long string of painful experiments.

Retiring the movement you fear

Sometimes a client is afraid of one specific exercise. Deadlifts are common for people with low back pain, and barbell pressing for people with shoulder tendinopathies. We usually remove that movement from your program entirely.

Months later, we might ask whether you’d like to try it again. If the answer is no, we carry on. There’s a wide range of other exercises that build the same strength. If you are ready, we start with:

• Lighter loads
• A shorter range of motion
• Slow, controlled reps, with the focus on quality over adding weight

You decide when you’re ready. A good exercise specialist never makes your recovery a test of courage.

Hiring a personal trainer while you’re injured

Ideally, you’ve already started working with a physiotherapist or athletic therapist before you hire a trainer. But if you want to bring fitness back into your life now and don’t want to wait, that’s understandable. Here’s what we ask for before we start:

• Notes from your physio explaining how severe the injury is
• Your current protocol: the exercises they’ve given you as homework, anything we should avoid, and any planned interventions such as surgery
• A note from your practitioner or family doctor confirming it’s okay to proceed

Bring these to your complimentary first session and we’ll build your program around them.

Red flags to watch for

• The trainer brushes off pain as part of the process. This is a toxic approach that makes training worse for clients. Athletes aren’t asked to compete while injured, so why should you have to train through it?
• The trainer never mentions a physio or other practitioner. A good personal trainer knows when an injury is beyond their scope and will point you to the right person.

For more warning signs to watch for, see our guide on how to choose the right personal trainer.

The bottom line

Personal training can absolutely work with an injury, as long as your trainer respects the limits of their role. Look for someone who asks how long it’s hurt, wants to hear from your physio, adjusts your training until it’s pain-free, and lets you rebuild confidence at your own pace. That’s how you keep getting stronger while your body heals.