My 4 Favourite Sports This Summer - Also Great For Pain Management!

Basketball

I still rock at shooting hoops. Granted, the running and real game of trying to get the ball is something I stay away from now with my bad knees and back issues, but that didn't keep me from shooting hoops and being the winner every time we went down to play basketball. There were a few times where I was a bit too enthusiastic and had to pay with lots of back pain afterwards but I still enjoyed playing these hours together as a family. Even though our daughter is scared from the ball and will just dive to the side rather than trying to catch is most of the times, lol.

Our basketball including the basketball court in the picture

Swimming

I never really liked to swim in terms of swimming back and forward many times, but I've always loved being in the water, especially if it's a pool with some nice space and being maintained well. You know there are many pools that smell like chloride or other chemicals if not being treated correctly while cleaning, thankfully, we only had a few incidents here this summer where the smell was a bit strong so we can't complain.

For my back, mostly the hernia issue that was discovered in July, I forced myself to swim even though I didn't like to do so because it was by far the easiest and most efficient way to get rid of pain as well as stay in motion. It's hard to do so when you feel the pain level is constant or goes up some days, it's easy to think that nothing will work to bring relief. I'm happy that I pushed through and learned that even if it's just a short swim and a few laps I feel a huge different not just in my back but also in my arms.

Aqua jogging

Some days when I was a slow swimmer due to pain or being too stiff, I swam a few laps and also took the time to do a bit of "aqua jogging" as I like to call it while I was in the deep water to compensate for not being able to swim more laps these days. These simple motions really made a difference.

As you can see the ball is torn quite badly, it needs to be replaced at the end of the summer :)

Ball game in the water

I can't really put a name to this "sport" but I can say with 100% certainty that this simple ball game we did in the pool all summer was very effective to stay in motion, build stamina as well as train some muscles. It doesn't fit in any of these games like water polo or volleyball because we only used the ball and ourselves.

Yet if you only have a ball available, I would say please give it a try because shooting the ball and catching it has been so much more fun than I could ever imagine. Almost every day that we went swimming we took our (not too big) ball we bought back in Budapest and for the first time in these years it's been used so many days of the summer.

Thanks to my success throwing the basketball in the hoop, I was already confident that I'd be a good thrower with this ball as well, but I never thought that I'd be able to stay in the deep for sometimes a full hour and able to constantly catch the ball (read: without drowning haha) and even more so that I'd be able to throw back the ball this far and high while I needed to stay above water.

For comparison, my boyfriend who's much more trained than I am, and has a lot more muscle strength in general, can still not stay in the deep for longer than 10 minutes to do this, he can't manage the floating and throwing/catching at the same time at all. So our constant set up was: daughter in the beginning of the pool, boyfriend in the middle, and I stayed in the back part. Usually my boyfriend would stay much closer to our daughter to make sure the distance was good for her to throw and catch.

Most active summer in years

It really helped to have a community pool this summer as well as a basketball court (and tennis court but we never used it) because we used both the pool and basketball court to get some exercise while enjoying family time and the nice weather. Even though the pool closes in 4 weeks, we will keep using the basket ball court (more often) after summer and maybe even check out if we like tennis as well at some point.

Just a small investment to have loads of active hours, money well spent!

I've enjoyed the outside sports much more than indoor and even started to like it a lot. Great progress! The biggest win is the fact that I barely feel any pain at the hernia location anymore, some days I'm out of luck but I feel lucky overall and grateful that it didn't ruin my summer. In fact, it challenged me to do better and enjoy it a lot more.

What type of sports / activity do you love to do in the summer?