The Hardest Thing You’ll Ever Have to Do After an Injury – Let It Heal

Relax and let your injury heal. Your body will thank you for it!

Many of the clients who come to see Dr. Lathrop are passionate athletes. They range from rough-and-tumble high school athletes to weekend warriors and even competitive athletes. What they all have in common is that they always, always want to get back on the field as soon as possible after an injury. For too long, our culture has operated on a “shake it off” mentality that encourages athletes to push through pain and keep playing. Pain is the body’s way of telling you that it is injured. Playing through the pain may seem courageous in the moment, but it can actually hurt your long-term prospects as an athlete!

Pain Often Means Injury

An injury like a twisted ankle or torn ligament changes the body on a cellular level. The swelling, inflammation, and drumming pain you feel is your body’s way of telling you to stop using that area of the body ASAP! The body needs time to recover, and the worst thing you can do is to keep running on that swollen ankle or otherwise ignoring the signals that your body is giving you.

This may seem obvious, but Dr. Lathrop constantly has to convince and cajole his athlete clients to take a break from their activity. How long? Until the injury is completely healed.

Letting the Injury Heal

One of the biggest mistakes athletes make is resting only long enough so that the worst of the pain of an injury passes and then taking the field again. Far too often, the injury itself is not entirely healed. Even though the pain may be much less, your body is still damaged, and there is just no way your injury can totally heal if you are running, jumping, and diving too soon afterwards.

It can be frustrating to take a month or even six months off in order to let an injury totally heal. Many athletes worry that they will lose the skills and gains they worked so hard to build, while others may have to skip important competitions or drop out of their team sports temporarily. However, the alternative is much worse. If you go back to your sport too early, your injury will never heal. You’ll face the prospect of playing in constant low grade pain that may grow and grow as the unhealed injury spreads. You won’t make many improvements to your game that way!

Something else to consider is that you are much more likely to reinjure yourself seriously if you already have an existing injury. For example, if a twisted ankle is not fully healed, it is highly likely that you’ll twist it again, and the new injury will probably be even worse and take longer to heal than the original.

In other words, even if it means another few months on the sidelines, let your injury heal all the way! You can use this time to do some off season training that won’t stress your injury, such as cycling or swimming.

How to Know When Your Injury Is Healed

Sometimes it can be hard to know when an injury is entirely healed. If you feel any sort of pain at the injury site when you take up your sport again, that’s a sure sign that it is not healed. You can also use the SCENAR to follow the progress of your healing. The SCENAR can actually read your galvanic skin response (biochemical signals the skin releases) and give you a readout that indicates the level of your injury. If you place the electrodes on the skin at the injury site and the reading comes back around 65, then the injury is serious. A reading of around 45 means the injury is healing. Once you get a reading of around 30 at the injury site, that means the SCENAR is no longer detecting any injury. You should be good to take the field again.

Don’t own a SCENAR? If you are a serious athlete or passionate weekend warrior, consider purchasing a SCENAR or scheduling a treatment with a nearby expert.