Prevention and Care of Injuries

Preventative HealthSports Therapy
Written By Emma Letki

Tell me if this sounds familiar, you’re climbing or running, doing your favourite physical activity, and you fall. No biggie, especially if you are a climber! But this time was a bit different, it hurt when you landed. 

So, how do you take care of your injury?

Recently this happened to me, I was climbing, I missed a hold and fell off the wall. Instead of landing on my bum and rolling back (as we are all taught to do), I landed on one ankle. It was a minor strain. I took some time to care for it, and then got back to climbing! 

Because I know how to take care of injuries, the strain didn’t affect my daily activities and my ankle was fully healed 2 weeks later. What I did wasn’t difficult, anyone can do it! I want to share how to deal with an injury, so that you can get back to what you love!

Prevention of Injuries

Some of the most common ways to injure yourself is skipping the prep work.

Skipping your warm up

Training with faulty technique

Muscle imbalances

Warm ups are a great preventative measure, where you can also practice your technique, and address any muscle imbalances you know of. Doing sport specific warm ups deepens your mind body connection, and preps your muscles for what’s to come. 

Building a warm up is super easy! In broad terms you want to think about what muscle groups you’re using in the activity, and take those muscles through their full range of motion.

Let’s take climbing, where the major muscle groups are back, arm, core + gluteal, and leg muscles. A good warm up will make sure to touch each of these groups, in a similar way to how they will be used. 

And in running you are using your core + gluteals, hip flexors and leg muscles. So a good warm up for running will focus on taking your hips, knees, and ankles through their full range of motion.

Other preventative measures include taking breaks during your workout to prevent muscle fatigue, and staying hydrated. They are obvious, but a lot of people overlook them (I’m guilty of pushing through a workout).

Getting an acute injury

You’ve done all the preventative things, but you’ve still ended up getting hurt. Likely the fault of a rogue acorn thrown in your path from a conspiratorial squirrel. 

PEACE + LOVE will save you. I kid you not, this is the hot new acronym. It is recommended to use on minor injuries. But, what does it mean? In the first 1-3 days, PEACE:

Protect

Avoid movements that activate pain for 1-3 days.

Elevate

Elevate the injured area higher than your heart as often as possible. 

Avoid anti-inflammatories

Avoid anti-inflammatories (including ice!) as they reduce tissue healing. 

Compress

Wrapping the area can help reduce swelling.

Educate

Your body knows best! Let your body do its thing!


After day 3, LOVE:

Load

Let your body guide you as you return to normal activities. Pain indicates that you should slow down.

Optimism

Your brain can affect your healing! Be confident and positive! You body is already doing a great job!

Vascularization

Add pain free cardiovascular activity to boost blood flow. Increased blood flow means more white blood cells (our repair team) to the injured area.

Exercise

Take an active approach to healing! Exercise improves mobility, strength, proprioception, and reduces risk of reinjury.

I love this approach to acute injury healing because it is based on our physiology and the best available evidence!

If your injury hasn’t resolved in 2 weeks, you should connect with a manual therapist to see if there is anything that needs extra attention.

What’s going on in your body?

When you get an injury, your body’s response (at a cellular level) is: 

Tell the rest of the body that it’s injured. This is done through your nervous system and through chemicals released into your blood.

The immune system kicks into high gear and sends white blood cells to the injured area.

With the extra blood cells, the injured area will begin to swell, become red, and be hot. These are 3 of the signs of an inflammatory response. 

Next your body will begin repairing the injured tissue by laying down new tissue cells, and breaking down damaged tissue cells. 

All this cellular activity means increased traffic, which needs good highways. AKA blood flow.

Why you shouldn’t use ice!

Even though ice is most people’s go to injury response, there is limited supporting evidence, it slows down white blood cells (our healing response), narrows the blood vessels (AKA highways) to area, and reduces the signals that promote healing. 

For minor injuries, it's best to try to stay away from ice. For more serious injuries, go ahead and manage the symptoms with some ice. 

Putting it all together

So what does all this look like in practice? What should you *actually* do when you get injured?

Support your body in what it is already doing!

Stop what you are doing.

Take some deep breaths and remember your body is really good at healing!

GENTLY test your range of motion, can you get home? Or do you need to go the emergency?

If it’s a minor injury, move the rest of your body to support blood flow.

If it’s your ankle that might look like leg swings or hip circles, doing the clock, knocking on heavens door, and some big arm + shoulder circles. 

Once you are home, put your feet up, and wrap your injury in an elastic bandage. 

Over the next few days, keep moving, letting your body and pain levels guide your activity. 

With the right approach, injuries don’t have to be major setbacks. Listen to your body. Healing happens so much better when we work with our bodies! 

So the next time you find yourself facing a minor injury, trust that your body is doing a good job, support it with gentle movement, and know that you’re on the path to recovery. And soon you’ll be back to climbing, running, or whatever activity brings you joy.


Have questions about an injury recovery?

Shoot me an email or book an appointment!

Emma Letki
Previous

8 Ways To Naturally Help Your Child Poop.
Next

The Leash Effect: DOG edition