Ryan Zimmerman on all his injuries: "It's been a rough couple of years for me"

Nationals first baseman Ryan Zimmerman has been out since September 7 with left oblique soreness. Manager Matt Williams said Wednesday during pregame that Zimmerman is doing light swings in the batting cage and working off a tee. It's a small step as Zimmerman looks to get back to baseball activities.

"He's been swinging," Williams said. "Still feels it, unfortunately. So it's light in the cage. It's fungo and tee work, a little bit of soft toss. So he's trying to work through that part of it to get ready to go. He's day-to-day. That's the best way we can put it."

"It's just one of those things where you have to give it time because obviously if you don't, it's going to go back to where it was," Zimmerman told 106.7 The Fan's Craig Heist. "Just got to continue to do the treatment and stuff we've been doing and hope that we don't run out of time."

Despite the length of time it has taken to get Zimmerman back to actually swinging a bat, the veteran has never thought about just abandoning an attempt to get back before October 4.

"I don't think we'll ever shut it down," Zimmerman said. "We're going to have to continue to rehab it no matter what until it gets better. It's just going to be a matter of whether I can get to that point before our season's over. Hopefully, I can get back. I'd like to play again. That's the whole point of kind of doing all this stuff. But you can't really rush something like this."

Zimmerman has dealt with a few injuries the last couple of seasons: his shoulder, his thumb, a hamstring, his foot and now his oblique. It seems every season he has had to deal with more than one issue.

"It's tough. It's frustrating," Zimmerman said. "It'd be different if I didn't work hard or if I didn't do things to stay on the field. It's been a rough couple of years for me and (I'll) make some adjustments this offseason, hopefully, and do everything I can to play 145, 150 games."

Zimmerman said just lifting weights to build strength in his shoulders and arms, back and legs is not the only solution. Just getting bigger won't solve the problem. He believes he will need to go in a different direction as far as isolating muscles he needs to focus on improving.

"It's a different kind of stronger," Zimmerman said. "It's the little muscles that aren't fun to lift and aren't cool to lift. You have to worry about a lot of other things you didn't have to worry about five years ago. It's part of the evolution and you have to learn. Unfortunately, the only way to learn is to get hurt. The past couple of years I've gotten hurt couple times and learned from that, make some adjustments and move forward."

Zimmerman said that he will meet with team medical and strength training personnel in the offseason to figure out a plan of attack to help him get ready for 2016 and maybe be in a better spot to play more games that season.

"You just assess what your weaknesses are and kind of go from there," Zimmerman said. "As you get older, flexibility and core strength and a lot of those little muscles you never really paid attention to are more important. (You) look at your weaknesses and what the doctors and trainers think are causing these problems and kind of attack those and go from there."

And big picture, he knows his club has an extremely limited margin of error to catch the Mets. They will need New York to falter, and the Nationals will pretty much need to win out to repeat as division champs.

"Obviously, we've put ourselves in a tough position," Zimmerman said. "But all we can do is go out every day and try and win. The chances of us winning every game is slim, but when they lose, we don't have time not to win. Just go out and play every game like it's the last game and try and win each one and see what happens."

Hear Heist's interview with Zimmerman in its entirety during Sunday's "Nats Insider" at 12 p.m. on 106.7 The Fan.