ironguides

The difference between the elite and the non-elite can at times be how they react to an injury. Do they rest when they need to? Do they seek care from a sports injury specialist? Do they take that professional’s advice and apply it with the same discipline they follow their training plan with?  Do they focus on rehab exercises and get back into training as their body tells them they can, or do they force their body to try to keep up in a never ending cycle of pain/spasm/rest/overtraining/pain? 

Now the important question – what do you do? 

Our bodies react to physical stress by laying down connective tissue to strengthen an area of weakness.  Most connective tissue tends to be relatively in-elastic (non-flexible), and most often is laid down in a spider-web type of matrix instead of along planes of stress. The end result is decreased flexibility in a given muscle.  Decreased flexibility leads to abnormal joint biomechanics and abnormal pressure on the joints that a given muscle crosses.  

If micro-trauma (from training hard…this is a reason you’re sore after a hard workout) is created in a muscle, there will be an inflammatory response that occurs – our body’s way of speeding up the healing process.  Inflammation allows increased blood flow into an area to bring specialized cells like fibroblasts into the area that lay down the above mentioned connective tissue.  This same inflammatory process creates swelling due to the fact that micro-trauma (small scale tearing of the muscle fiber) also creates micro-trauma to the surrounding capillaries and lymph channels.  The result?  Blood and nutrition can get into an area, but it can’t get out.   

Swelling from any type of trauma (spraining an ankle or training hard) is usually worst in the lower extremity.  It’s easy to realize why when you consider your body to be a large column of water.  At the bottom, the pressure is higher than at the top.  The heart pumps blood down to the feet, but returning that blood to the heart is dependent on muscle contraction and other passive mechanisms for the body to return fluids to the heart via the vascular and lymphatic system. 

The important thing to do after an injury is to keep the body moving in a pain free range of motion.  Whether it’s the body-wide microtrauma of an Ironman or acute trauma from spraining an ankle, light motion will help to maintain joint range of motion, move fluid out of the extremities, decrease swelling and promote the exchange of nutrition and metabolic by-products throughout the body.   

The result?  Faster healing and a decrease in the likelihood that adhesions form in muscles or between muscles that end up decreasing your range of motion and eventually leading to a chronic injury due to aberrant joint biomechanics.  That’s one reason your coach may tell you to get back on the bike the day after a long race – not for extra training, but to get the pump going and promote the exchange of nutrition and the return of metabolic waste products and inflammatory products to the liver and kidneys.  This is usually best done on the bike, since it’s non-impact, and therefore won’t cause more microtrauma. 

By stopping suddenly and doing relatively little after a major event, your body gets the message that it’s ok not to move anymore.  Any joint or muscle that has been moving a lot, or even too much will have a predisposition toward creating fibrous tissue to decrease the mobility in the area.  Light exercise will counteract this tendency, and promote flexibility and mobility instead of stiffness and inflexibility.   

So keep moving after an event, and you’ll be much more able to maintain everything you’ve worked hard to create thus far.   

I’ll be back with more on this topic soon.