Calorie Intake During Injury Recovery

born_of_fire74

I managed to mess up my knee last month. Old sports injury back to haunt me. I'm out of the acute phase, getting into recovery with my physiotherapist and things are coming along fairly well. I've taken an entire month off at the gym to focus on getting my leg into a good condition before going back to CrossFit. I've also been doing a small cut/hovering just below maintenance (~150 cal deficit/day) for most of the summer to recomp/lose those last few vanity pounds--gawd my legs carry a lot of fat! LOL

My question is this: since I want to repair and strengthen my quad and hamstrings to best protect my knee, should I stop with the small cut? I feel like the answer is yes because I want to build muscle however I've also reduced my activity while not attending the gym so maybe I don't need to...

I'm currently 5'4" 130lbs +/- 2lbs depending on the day and something like 23% BF based on photo comparisons although I've never had it actually measured. Maybe I should even consider a bulk/cut cycle? I really don't want to get fluffy again but my knee is my knee for the rest of my life so that kind of takes priority.

What say you?

jjpptt2

I think you need to be very specific about what you want to accomplish. I don't know very much about injuries/recovery, so this may be a good question for your physio, but...

If you simply want to strength existing muscles/ligaments/etc, then there's no real need to increase your calories.

If you want to build new muscle tissue, then you likely will want to increase cals. However, building muscle tissue also requires sufficient stimulus to the muscle - can you do that given the injury?

born_of_fire74

jjpptt2 wrote: »

I think you need to be very specific about what you want to accomplish. I don't know very much about injuries/recovery, so this may be a good question for your physio, but...

If you simply want to strength existing muscles/ligaments/etc, then there's no real need to increase your calories.

If you want to build new muscle tissue, then you likely will want to increase cals. However, building muscle tissue also requires sufficient stimulus to the muscle - can you do that given the injury?

Haha, I just posted this, literally seconds ago, into another forum in case I had put it in the wrong spot. Thanks for the response jjpptt2. I'm not sure I know the answer to your question. I tore my hamstring quite seriously so does that mean I want to strengthen the existing muscle or am I building new muscle?

jjpptt2

I'd ask your physio, but it seems to me that you'd be better served focusing on repairing and strengthening what you've got... in which case a small calorie deficit shouldn't be a problem. But keep the deficit small since you are repairing that injured muscle.