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. 

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Why Can’t the Body Always Heal Itself?

If the body is so good at healing itself, why do some injuries seem to linger?

The body is an amazing healing machine. Cuts disappear, leaving behind only light scars. Twisted ankles eventually mend, and even fractured bones knit back together. And yet…why is it that some injuries just never seem to heal? Why do certain wounds stay open for years and backs chronically ache after a mild injury? The truth is that in many respects, the body’s healing process is an anachronism, built to respond to circumstances that no longer exist.

The Caveman Healing Process

For the vast majority of our time here on earth, humans have lived as hunters and gatherers. In our caveman days, we lived very dangerous lives. We had to chase our food, fight for land, and protect our families. This often led to serious injuries. In response, the body’s healing factor would cause swelling around the injury site as well as a big dose of pain to work as a warning that the injured area should not be used.

Isolating injuries was important for survival, so for more serious injuries, the body would slap on scar tissue as a way of protecting the injury without fully healing it. These days, we don’t need massive amounts of pain or the quick and easy patch-up of scar tissue to help us stay on our feet. We don’t have to be ready to run away from sabretooth tigers at the watering hole or protect our village from invaders. What we need today is to convince our body to skip the scar tissue build-up and to work to actually fully and completely heal injuries.

The SCENAR Healing Process

This is where the SCENAR comes in. This little device delivers electro-stimulation that travels through the skin and stimulates cells in the injured area. Basically, it supercharges the mitochondria in the cells, which operate like the cell’s batteries. With its batteries fully charged, the cell can work on producing more helpful proteins that bind torn tissue back together, thus healing an injury instead of just slapping scar tissue over it and calling it a day.

Unfortunately, we can’t exactly tell our bodies to change the way they heal our injuries, but we can spur on the body’s natural healing processes, encouraging it to focus on healing instead of isolating the injury with scar tissue. The SCENAR is our method of promoting the body’s healing process and getting rid of pain permanently.

If you have a new or nagging injury that simply isn’t healing on its own, the SCENAR may be able to help. Considering visiting a SCENAR expert near you or purchasing your own SCENAR, so you can stay healthy in the long term. 

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How Cross-Training Can Help You Prevent Injuries and Chronic Pain

Yoga, Pilates, and stretching are all great cross-training options. Photo via Visual hunt 

There’s a reason why every sport has its own group of common injuries. Tennis elbow and shoulder injuries are rife in tennis and golf. Plantar fasciitis, Achilles tendinitis, and shin splints take center stage in the world of running. Whenever you put specific areas of your body under a constant level of strain, you invite injuries. Of course, that doesn’t mean you should give up your beloved sport and spend your days binging on Netflix. Instead, incorporate cross-training into your workout routine.

Cross-training simply means adding different exercises and activities into your workout routine that take the emphasis off of the joints and muscles you use most in your primary activity. Are you a runner who spends your days putting constant pressure on your feet, ankles, knees, and hips? A great cross-training option is to add two days of cycling, swimming, or weight training into your workout routine.

How Cross-Training Helps Prevent Injuries

Years of regularly practicing a single sport or activity can wear down the primary joints, muscles, tendons, ligaments, and bones that you use in your sport. Additionally, you may ignore stabilizer muscles that are critical to helping you prevent injuries.  

Cross-training allows to take the pressure off overused muscle groups my introducing new methods of training, and also gives you the chance to strengthen stabilizer muscles. Many athletes cross-train by lifting weights and working on improving core strength, a key stabilizer system.

Cross-Training Can Help You Break out of Plateaus

Cross-training can also make you a better athlete! Putting your body through a different training regimen will force it to adapt by getting stronger in different areas. For example, strengthening your core may give you better balance and more overall strength. Perhaps swimming increases your cardiovascular endurance and strengthens different muscles in your shoulder. A lot of athletes discover that adding cross-training to their fitness routine two days a week can pay big dividends out of the field.

While cross-training can help you prevent future overuse injuries, it can’t help heal old and nagging injuries. For that you need to use the SCENAR. Only the SCENAR uses electrical pulses to reprogram your cells to begin healing again. While it works best on new injuries, it CAN heal most old injuries too, even if you’ve had them for years. You don’t have to give up on your favorite sport or physical activity when you use the SCENAR.

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