Accelerating Recovery from a Sports Injury: Part II – Managing the Healing Process

 Now you have some understanding of the healing process. The next step is to understand how you can take control of it.

We can think of the factors under our control in two categories: the engine and the steering wheel. The engine is our raw healing power; on a day-to-day basis how much potential for healing we have. The steering wheel determines how effectively that healingpower gets directed. Both components are important. If you have a big engine with no steering wheel you risk going the wrong way. A steering wheel with no engine and you go nowhere at all.

First let’s discuss the engine. Your healing engine is the sleep, nutrition, and stress reduction that you hear about ad nauseum when reading about health. And you hear about them all the time because they really are that important. A poor lifestyle will undermine an otherwise sound rehab plan. Here is how you can build you engine so that you can accelerate recovery should an injury occur:

1) Prioritize getting enough sleep. Seven to nine hours of continuous, high quality REM sleep is considered the ideal.

2) Eat enough. Tissue healing requires a lot of energy. Even minor injuries can increase daily caloric expenditure by 5-10%. Weigh this against any decrease in activity you might have as a result of the injury.

3) Eat protein. Tissue healing means making new tissue. Tissues are made of proteins. Aim for 0.6-0.8 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight.

4) Reduce stress. Your body can only recover from so much at once. You can’t control everything in life but focus on what you can. While you are healing try to reduce other stresses in your life.

Now let’s talk about the steering wheel. Our goal here is to get to the maturation phase avoiding any delays. What you want to avoid is a vicious cycle between inflammatory and proliferative phases by reinjuring yourself.

Managing an injury is all about deloading and reloading appropriately. Injured tissue cannot handle the stress it could pre-injury. Therefore, continuing to train at your previous level will surely make things worse. However, it doesn’t mean you need to just sit around either. With the exception of serious injuries such as full thickness muscle or ligament tears, you can usually get back to training at a reduced capacity right away.

Deloading is all about finding a training intensity that allows the body to transition from the inflammatory to the proliferative stage. By deloading you are avoiding doing too much and getting stuck with chronic inflammation leading to not merely a lack of healing but actually further tissue degeneration.

Reloading is about not disrupting proliferation and then optimizing maturation. Reload too quickly and again you are sent back to step one. However, tissue maturation is primarily a response to loading. If you reload insufficiently, your injured tissue will not grow strong. It can remain like the cooked spaghetti we discussed before. That means you develop a chronic weak point, and are at greater risk of reinjury even years down the line when you think you have healed.

Getting deloading and reloading right are highly specific to your individual attributes. Your particular injury, current training, training history, response to training, and goals all can drastically change the plan. This means that you should be wary of advance beyond the broadest principles. On the other hand, you are the expert in you. Once you fully understand your injury and perhaps get some guidance on a deloading and reloading plan, then you are the person best equipped to make decisions for yourself.

Read on to the case studies to learn the logic and steps in building out an individualized rehab program in practice.