Running Injuries - Learn How They Heal

in this video I'll explain to you how injuries heal and how you can use the body's natural healing process combined with a little bit of rest and careful strengthening exercise to make the best recovery possible welcome my name is Marika and I'm the physiotherapist at sports injury physio comm if this is your first time here and you would like to learn how to stay injury free make sure to subscribe and hit the little bell so that you don't miss any of the updates how do injuries heal now this may sound a bit weird coming from a physiotherapist but you don't actually need to be massaged or manipulated or receive acupuncture anything like that for your injury to heal those type of techniques can all make the symptoms feel better it can take pain away or it can decrease pain for a little bit it can take muscle spasm away but the fact is that all of these symptoms will return again if the injury doesn't heal correctly and your body is pretty good at healing itself as long as you give it the right circumstances to do so so what did bodies need basically they need a combination of rest and exercise now rest alone is not useful because our bodies are programmed to survive and to survive it is forever trying to conserve energy so if you just rest something and you don't actually use that body part for a long period of time the brain just thinks that you don't need it and it doesn't see a reason to make it stronger that's why often the pain will settle but you go back to sports and then you re injure yourself quite quickly now on the flip side if you try and strengthen it too quickly and it's not ready for it you will also tear the new cells that's formed because they're not strong enough for it so it's quite important to get that combination of rest and exercise right to get the injury stronger and the essential part to getting that right is actually understanding the healing process now it's not difficult it's got three components the first is the inflammatory phase second is the proliferation phase and the third is a remodeling phase so let's look at what these phases mean the first one the inflammatory phase is pretty much just what it says it lasts full but it starts immediately when you get injured and then it lasts for about the first five to seven days so let's have a look at what happens when you sustained an injury I'm going to use a calf muscle strain as an example because it's quite a common injury that people get so a muscle strain happens when some of the muscle fibers tear and you often also tear a few blood vessels and if you do a proper job of it you may even involve the tendon or ligaments around that area as well now if you get a lot of swelling and bruising it means that you've likely torn quite a few blood vessels and that's the reason for all the swelling and the bruising depending on how badly you've injured the body part the inflammatory phase can last for anything between three to seven days as I've said and what happens during this phase is all of the damaged cells needs to be removed so a clot forms inside kind of like you know when you fall or you braze your skin and you get a scab on your skin it's the same thing that happens inside the body except it's a soft clot that forms and this clot also will act as the scaffolding for the new cells to come and attach to but the inflammatory phase is quite important because that's the way that the cell this the body gets rid of the broken cells so you have these specific cells that comes in and they eat the broken cells up so inflammation has been given a bad name or throughout the years because everybody grabs anti-inflammatories and things and try to get the inflammation down when they're injured but actually we now understand that the inflammatory phase is a very important part of the healing process so they are now discouraging people to take anti-inflammatories within the first five days of sustaining injuries and at least you have excessive swelling and excessive inflammation so if you can get away with just using ice instead of in anti-inflammatories that's much better the other thing that you should really stay away from is any quartey's corticosteroids like cortisone injections within that period because that really stops the healing process from happening the other important thing now I'm hoping if you're going to the gym that you're not a smoker but if you do smoke just know that nicotine actually also stops the healing process that's why you see smokers often look a lot older they skin and things are later in life because it doesn't regenerate that quickly so what do you do during this the first five to seven days of an injury well the first thing is to protect that injury site so if you feel your calf muscle go while you're exercising then stop what you're doing because if you keep on exercising at that moment that calf muscle is now weaker than what it used to be so you will actually it will take less force to injure it further also if you keep on running on it or keep on doing exercise on it you will cause more swelling and more bleeding and the pressure from that can actually injure other cells because it can cause them to not get the blood supply that they need to recover or to just survive to be honest so it's the old acronym of rice which is rest immobilize so that you protect it compress now when I say compression it's basically to stop the initial bleeding and to help a little bit with the swelling so the initial compression within the first ten minutes can be quite firm but after that be careful because if you put too much compression on to an injury you can actually stop the blood supply and make it worse again so it's quite it's more think of it as firmness rather than strong compression then also as I said ice so the ice is quite useful because that can limit the swelling because it stops bleeding but it can also act as a slight anti-inflammatory function so that you don't get quite excessive inflammation but you don't stop the whole press process either then they important but that's missing from rice is the M at the end that physios have started putting in these days which stands for movement now when I say movement it's not trying to do your full movement it's just keeping the body part gently active within limits of pain the research has actually shown that if you do that your recovery time is quicker so don't be overprotective yes of course if it's painful just keep it still for a while but as soon as you can try to just gently move the body part so that's your first five days after an injury so you'll agree to exercise that specific injury site at that point would be a little bit stupid because you'll just retail or you'll just further injure that site now the next phase is the proliferation phase which can last between 14 and 21 days now these phases aren't said that this one stops that one starts they all overlap a little bit during the proliferation phase you you get new cells you build new cells the body produces more collagen more muscle cells depending on what you've injured the problem is that all of these new cells kind of just gets put there like spaghetti on a plate so they're not aligned as they should be in the muscle they are all tangled and they're not strong cells yet they quite fine cells so during this phase although the wound is getting a little bit stronger it's still quite weak because these fibers aren't quite functional yet and that's why I'm going to jump onto the remodeling phase immediately because I feel that they interact a little bit so the remodeling phase is the third phase and that overlaps quite a lot with the proliferation phase because during this phase the body now realizes which has to align these cells in the direction that you need them to be aligned in and make them stronger so let me explain how this happens so the new cells form they're in a total wrong position your brain realizes which way to align these cells through gentle movement so we call it mechanical strain basically because if you can imagine my bicep muscle say for instance I've given it a slight muscle strain or tear there now imagine the muscle fibers all aligned in funny positions I want them to be in this aligned in this direction so if I gently move my arm up and down I'm tugging on the sides of the muscle fibers and I'm telling them I want you to be aligned in this direction now you will agree that at this point where I've got new muscle fibers they're not think yet they still quite fine you can't go and do heavy weights that like the ones you've done before they were injured because you will just retain them so you've got to cut it back to the point where you can do the full range of movement without pain before you can even think about starting to load it up with with weight and that's where I'm quite excited about the Egypt system that change has in the gym now you guys who may have used that system you'll know that you can set it perfectly for your joint range of movement you can limit your range of movements so say for instance my arm hurts when it gets there but it's okay to train up until there you can actually set that equipment that it doesn't allow you to go below that point and you can also set the resistance that it's so low that it that is just enough to strengthen it up so how does the body know to strengthen things up okay so what happens is if you strain the new muscle fibers just enough that it's a little bit hard but not hard enough to tear them the brain realizes that oh okay that was quite hard I think we need stronger muscle fibers there and it rebuilds them a bit stronger so the next time you trained you can do a little bit more and then that acts as a signal again to the brain that oh okay that was good but it was still hard so we need to make it a little bit stronger the key lies in not overstepping that mark and understanding that you need enough rest periods in between now I'm a big what's the word that I'm looking for I love the concept of relative rest relative rest means that you rest from the activities that causes you discomfort or strains that injury in the wrong way while you carry on with the things that are safe and the reason I like this is one it stops you from losing all your fitness fitness and two it also actually keeps the blood supply I've lost my words now gives you a better blood supply and blood and circulation is needed for better nutrients so you actually help your injury heal quicker so again let's come to come back to the example of a calf strain so yes you may not be able to run and yes you may not be able to jump but you may still you can still do everything from the knees up basically so you can do squats you can do knee extension exercises you can do anything for the core you can do anything for the upper body you may even be able to start back cycling gently before long before you can run and the gentle eye the gentle action action of the bike can improve the circulation and the calf muscle and help to strengthen the injury again so it's all about being clever about it another example of relative rest again let's think of the calf muscle is if you go running in the swimming pool rather than running outside if we think of upper body say for instance you've strained your shoulder now nothing stops you from exercising the other side or the positions that doesn't actually use that painful bit so coming back to the example of bicep strain yes you won't be able to do bicep curls you won't likely be able to do overhead pulling things but you may be able to do flies or you may be able to do what's another example so biceps works in this position so you may be able to do tricep extensions with our arms with a pulley system it's all just about identifying the movements that you can do and making sure that you don't do the things too hard that they actually affect the other body parts and again that's where I find that it works quite well when I work closely together with personal trainers because I can identify the things that you can do and I can identify the limits to where you should be working and personal trainers are really usually very good at then sticking to these limits and being creative thinking of another other exercises that you can do with the rest of the body so that you don't get bored of course the big thing with an injury is also that it can often derail your habit of exercise and it's quite hard break breaking when you've managed to do put all the hard work in for good six months and you're really enjoying exercise just to be injured then take a prolonged period of time off and then you find you actually just don't have the motor to get back to training so it's always better to try and keep something going rather than stop altogether okay so let's recap the phases of healing is your inflammatory phase during which you've got to be really nice to the injury and protect it a little bit give a gentle range of movement exercises but nothing into pain and you can use ice to help with the swelling and inflammation and that lasts for roughly five to seven days then you've got your proliferation phase where your new cells form but remember these cells are still lying around in the wrong direction and you need gentle movement to start telling in which direction it needs to lie into or realign itself into and then you need during the remodeling phase you need gentle careful strengthening so that you get it stronger but without actually breaking it back down thank you for watching if you would like to learn more about preventing sports injuries make sure you hit the subscribe button see you next time

Channel: Sports Injury Physio

Views: 11,954

Keywords: sports injuries, injuries, injury recovery, injury treatment at home, injury treatment, sports injury physiotherapist, sports injury physio, injury, running injuries, sports medicine, rehab, physical therapy, running injury prevention, injury prevention for runners, running injury, coming back from a running injury, returning to running after injury, knee injury running treatment

Id: tcuK8Jo-t6k

Length: 15min 3sec (903 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 17 2018