Injury Recovery and Prevention

Do you know about RICE?

“Sit down, elevate it, and write a blog post about taking injuries seriously!” That’s what my friend told me recently when I complained about my foot being a bit sore after I did a tiny roll while running one morning. Injury recovery and prevention is not a very sexy topic but we can all relate to it at some point in our lives. Like everyone else, I can’t stand it when I have an injury and sometimes I try to ignore it or even push through it like it didn’t happen. But I’ve learned that’s the worst thing you could do. You may delay your recovery and do more damage than you think.

The first steps you should take for recovery whenever you have any kind of skeletal or muscular injury is RICE.

• Rest
• Ice
• Compression
• Elevation

After I RICE’d my ankle for a couple of hours and by the next morning I had totally forgot that I had even complained about a sore foot. That’s not to say that all injuries heal this quickly, it’s to prove a point, ignoring an injury may lead to a prolonged recovery.

Preventing injuries altogether is the ideal scenario. This can be done by adding cross training, stretching, a proper warm up and cool down to your fitness regime.  Doing a repetitive exercise without any cross training to build strength or proper stretching to increase the blood flow to the muscles can run the risk of overuse injuries. Try to mix it up – add a HIIT or yoga class, consider Pilates or boxing, just remember the goal is to try to do more than one type of exercise, you’ll see results and be less injury prone.

And if you’re currently injured and wishing you could get back to exercising – hang in there. You will recover and be back at it shortly.

“Run when you can, walk if you have to, crawl if you must; just never give up” – Dean Karnazes