So last year, I went to a destination wedding in Mexico. At the beach, there was a soccer field type set up with goal posts in the middle of the sand. We decided to throw around a frisbee and one of my piece of shit “best friends” lead me directly into the goal post with the frisbee. This goal post was dug into the earth’s core, so it didn’t move when I ran into it, so I definitely lost that battle.
I was running as fast as I can trying to catch the frisbee and banged up my right ribs, right knee and right big toe. I got the wind knocked out of me as I flew over it but when I caught my breath, I saw that I was bleeding from my knee and everything hurt. But after a quick self-check up, I knew I didn’t seriously injure myself (ribs are in place, didn’t hurt to breathe, I can move every part of my body with tolerable pain and I can walk with tolerable pain but with a limp. It’s possible I may have had a small break in my big toe but no big deal), Nothing serious, I just lost a fight with an immovable goal post.
Another friend (who happens to be the wife of the piece of shit who threw the frisbee) comes to check up on me while my POS best friend was busy laughing . She asks “should I get you an Advil or ice or something?”. I reply with “why?”. She goes on to explain how I want to reduce inflammation and reduce the pain (she’s really really smart and funny).
But why would I want to do that? My body is really really good at healing itself. It evolved over millions of years to be able to do that well to keep me alive so I can have babies. I don’t have any systemic diseases that would get in the way of that process or exacerbate that process. A big part of that process is inflammation, that’s how your body heals itself. I don’t have any reason to believe that my body will over react to the injury and create a long term, unrelenting inflammatory process. Inflammation is good!
So to go down the list..
Anti-inflammatories
Taking anti-inflammatories at this time doesn’t make sense. I want the inflammation. That’s how I heal. Yes, the inflammation is painful, but it’s painful for a reason. It’s there to make the nerves around my injured areas more sensitive. With that, my brain will get a lot more danger messengers coming from my body and become overprotective of my injured areas. It will make me feel pain, even while I’m perfectly safe, to stop me from further injuring myself. My brain is overprotective of me after an injury but at this time, I want it to be.
If I can tolerate the pain, I won’t try to decrease it with medication. In a situation with a recent traumatic event, even though the pain sucks, you want to have it so you don’t further injure yourself (this isn’t always the case when you have had a non-traumatic chronic pain). So I didn’t take any medication.
Elevation
My circulation is good and I’m able to walk, so why would I want to elevate my leg? The muscle pumping action in my legs and my healthy veins and arteries are plenty to keep all the fluids moving. I’m not going to waste my life laying down to keep my leg elevated, I got shit to do.
Rest
I don’t have an injury that is so severe that I want to rest. There are times when you SHOULDN’T be moving. In cases when there is severe injury, like a badly broken bone sticking out of your body, your muscles contracting can keep moving your bone further and further out of place. I was no where near that level of injury, so rest wasn’t for me. Complete rest would be the worst thing I can do, not only for my body but for my quality of life. I was in Mexico for a wedding and I was going to enjoy it.
Heat and Ice
Heat and ice on the surface of your skin don’t make a significant difference to the way your body reacts. So to say that I need to go out of my way and ice it to “help” inflammation is a waste of my life, especially if I want the inflammation right now. If anything, you can argue that it can constrict your blood vessels and get in the way of healing (blood flow is the most important thing for healing tissues). But if you couldn’t tolerate the pain and you put heat or ice on and it feels really good, and you feel it really helps, go for it. Ice will be more likely to feel good since it can numb the pain. I’m supposed to say that heat can potentially exacerbate the inflammatory process, but really… it’s not going to make a big difference either way. If it feels good, do it. If it doesn’t feel good, don’t do it.
Notice that with all these, there may be certain times, in certain specific situations, where it’s appropriate to use these tools to help you. But that doesn’t mean they are the right thing to do for EVERYONE.
Basically, I just let my body do the healing because that’s what it’s good at. No reason to mess with it.
Now inflammation is good, but you want to move that process along. Human bodies work really well when we’re constantly moving. That’s our default mode: moving. So it makes sense that this inflammatory process also works best when we’re moving. The best thing for me to do is to move my body as much as I can without further injuring myself or increasing my pain (notice these two things are different). So no, I’m not going to run around and keep playing frisbee. Running is something my body wouldn’t be able to tolerate at the time. But I did walk as much as I wanted even though I was kind of limping. I still danced and enjoyed every part of the wedding without missing anything. I moved my knee and toes as much as I could, while I was sitting, to keep the inflammatory process moving along. One of the worst things you can do for yourself is completely rest your body. Even a little bit of movement goes a LONG way for your healing and to reduce the chance of a chronic issue.
When I came back to NY a couple days later, I went right back to squatting and deadlifting. But I started out with much less weight while doing all leg exercises. I wanted to see what my body can tolerate. I gradually increased the weight to my normal as time went on. Yes, I felt some pain in my ribs, knee and toe for the next few months. (In my toe especially, I would feel a really sharp pain while walking sometimes that would stop me in my tracks). But as the months went by, I felt better and better with the pain becoming less and less frequent and intense. (If I wasn’t getting better and better as the weeks and months were going by, then I would know I was doing something wrong.)
If something doesn’t make sense, question it, call me out on it.
Disclaimer: This is not medical advice. This applies only to me in my particular situation at this time.
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