Week 12 - Keeping Going While you Wait

Continuing the journey

This 12-week programme has given you the information and tools to help you be active and healthy while you are waiting for your hip or knee replacement so that you can meet the challenge of surgery and have the best chance of a successful recovery. Starting a strength programme, committing to be active, managing your weight or stopping smoking is a difficult thing to do, but once you start it is important to keep it going.

Once you have lived with certain lifestyle changes for a while, you will feel the benefits such as increased mobility and energy, improved weight management and reduced risk of falls and might not want to stop. To help yourself at the start, get support from friends or family and see if they will take on the commitment with you. Building up your activities, making a habit of exercising and eating well is all beneficial, but it is important to build up slowly and allow your body time to get used to the new activity and routines.

Goal setting and action planning

Many people find it helpful to set themselves goals when they start a new activity or make a commitment for a healthier lifestyle. Setting meaningful goals and making an action plan to achieve them can help your focus and motivate you so you can sustain a momentum for your new behaviour. Meaningful goals are those that matter to you in a very personal way. Whatever your goals may be, setting them is always the first step towards reaching them. When setting yourself goals, remember that your condition is changeable, and it is important to remember to not be too hard on yourself. If being more active is your goal, even a small amount of movement on bad days can make such a difference and is still something to be proud of. You should also remember that when your condition changes, so should your goals and that is normal. Try to record how you feel after doing certain activity and learn how certain movements can make your body feel. You can also tell your family and friends about your goals and how the exercising is going, so they can help you stay on track.

Setting SMART goals

SMART goals are:

Specific - It says exactly what you want to accomplish
Measurable - It has concrete steps that allow you to track your progress; at the end of each milestone, you’ll know how far away you are from reaching your goal
Attainable - It’s something you know you can achieve because it’s within reach—you are physically and mentally capable of doing it
Relevant - It means a lot to you; achieving it will prove you are the strong, independent person you know you can be
Timebound - It has an end date to work toward, with multiple dates as checkpoints along the way

Set yourself small goals, like

Completing strengthening exercises twice a week
Being active for 10 minutes a day. Increasing 5 minutes each week
Losing 0.5 kg in 2 weeks.
Once you have a SMART goal you’d like to accomplish, it’s helpful to make an action plan to achieve it. No matter the goal you’d like to achieve, an action plan can help you:
List the steps you need to take
Identify health obstacles and solutions
Identify life obstacles and solutions
Ask people for help
Set milestones and if needed smaller targets

Keep going

Your condition can sometimes get in the way of your best intentions. That’s why it’s important to pick SMART goals and do your best to stick to them and try working towards a daily routine. To help you create a SMART goal you’d like to set for yourself and action plan, you can use the Active Wait goal Setting and Action Plan workbook.

Improving your health while you are waiting for surgery will be a challenge. But it is worth it as the better health you are in before surgery by exercising, managing your weight, and by choosing a healthy lifestyle, the better and quicker the recovery will be so you can go back to living a less painful and fuller life.

Download the Active Wait goal Setting and Action Plan workbook

Questionnaire

So that we can see if Active Wait has been useful for patients awaiting hip and knee surgery we would like you to complete a short questionnaire by clicking the link to the left.

This is entirely optional and will not affect your treatment or surgery in any way. All responses are anonymous and cannot be linked to your patient record.

Click here to complete the questionnaire

Your weekly exercises

Click the links below to see this week's exercises. You will need to do just one level. Start on the foundation level, and if you find it easy click on the intermediate and advanced exercises for a more difficult version.