The Best Way to Recover from Injury: Why Is Exercise Essential for Healing Injuries?
Explaining the Link Between Exercise and Healing
“Rest the back for a few days.”
“Keep your weight off that leg for a fortnight.”
“Put that arm in a sling. We’ll look at it next week.”
If you’ve suffered an injury, the likelihood is that you’ve received such advice from a physician. And you do what they tell you, because they know what they are doing, don’t they? And, of course, when you swing yourself out of bed, or go for that morning walk, or try to lift a bag of potatoes, you feel the pain. Another reason to rest up and let your injury heal itself over time.
But is rest and immobilization really the best advice? Does exercise promote healing?
The connection between exercise and healing
“There’s probably a major disconnect about how fitness and pain and injury are connected,” says Ryan Chow, founder of Reload PT.
From studies of epidemiology which learn about the conditions from which people are suffering, the big picture is that the most prevalent, common, deadly, and highest-costing conditions in our healthcare are chronic diseases and chronic pain. It’s a lengthy list of conditions, which includes:
Heart disease
Cancer
Diabetes
Cardiovascular disease
Stroke
Etc.
The common thread across all these conditions is a lack of physical activity. In a study titled ‘How does physical activity modulate pain?’, authors Laura Frey Law PT, Ph.D. and Kathleen A. Sluka PT, Ph.D., FAPTA note that:
“Large population studies show that individuals who are more physically active have a lower risk for development of chronic pain. It is also well recognized that exercise is an effective clinical treatment to reduce pain and improve function in a variety of pain conditions.”
The traditional healthcare approach is that if you’re hurting, then someone should be doing something for you. But this is decades-old advice, which has been superseded by hundreds, if not thousands, of research studies.
Take, as an example, the 2008 study of physical activity and back pain, which found people with moderate levels of physical activity are less likely to suffer frequent back pain than those who are physically inactive.
Physical inactivity is a major contributor to obesity – and by 2030 it is forecast that 50% of America’s population will be obese. Despite the prevalence of chronic conditions and obesity, fewer than one in five of the population is meeting physical activity guidelines.
Obesity and chronic conditions are worsening in America. Physical activity is declining. The link is undeniable. People may be living longer, but they aren’t living better. We have the highest investment in healthcare and fitness in history, but we have the least fit population ever – and it’s getting worse.
Ryan notes that “staying active is the lynchpin to getting people to sleep better, eat better, move more, have confidence, and have control over their situation and their pain… The science says that if you’re hurting, you gotta keep moving.”
How exercise promotes healing
If you don’t move it, you’re going to lose it.
Sure, the pain you feel may inhibit your movement and prompt you to take it easy, but it’s crucial to keep active. Movement improves blood flow. The proper exercise can help to reduce inflammation and prevent other complications that may hinder recovery.
However, you must also be wary of over-exercise. High-intensity exercise can be as damaging as a lack of activity. It’s a question of balance. Get the balance of activity right after the injury and you’ll bounce back stronger and faster, and the quality of life you experience will improve.
As your muscles, ligaments, and tendons heal with activity, your pain will subside. From here, you can continue to improve your body to reduce the risk of further injury.
The best way to recover from injury is to focus on long-term outcomes
The traditional approach to the treatment of chronic pain focuses on the short-term relief of that pain. Once the pain has been dealt with, that’s it. The doctor’s or physical therapist’s work is done. You’re left to return to your previous life. And therein lies the real problem.
This short-term focus does not help to solve the underlying issues that lie at the heart of the cause of an injury – up to 60% of those who recover from lower back pain had a recurrence within 12 months.
When we work with a client, we take a long-term view. In our first consultation, we spend 90 minutes or longer to establish everything we can about the client – their lifestyle, job, the sports they play, the exercise they take… everything that impacts their body. We conduct a physical examination, too, to learn about their range of movement and habits of motion.
We focus on:
What we can do for the client
What they are missing
The barriers we can solve so they can participate in this exercise
Prescribing to a client with an injury
Our full-body evaluation is only the start of prescribing a path to recovery and long-term pain-free living.
It’s crucial to maintain activity, but it’s also crucial to ensure that physical activity promotes recovery and leads to long-term outcomes.
“It comes down to the evaluation where we listen to the client’s story,” says Ryan. “We learn how it all started, what was going on in the person’s life leading up to it. What their symptoms are, what makes it better or worse…”
“A doctor will take an image of, say, an injured knee, and prescribe to that. But if you really listen to the story, you know that if you haven’t been running lately you aren’t fit to run. So instead of running to get fit, you should get fit to run.”
We assess what the image says, but learn why the image is what it is. We test the hypothesis physically, examining things like strength, mobility, flexibility, power, and speed. We take a high-end approach, based on sports science, rehab science, physiology, sports psychology, and so on.
We go to the world’s experts, learn about their methods, and then use this knowledge to apply to individual cases, adapting exercises and pivoting where need be to deliver the outcomes that the client desires.
“The key is,” Ryan says, “that we keep going until we figure it out, instead of giving a cookie-cutter treatment… the 70-year-old grandma should not get the same treatment as a 22-year-old athlete.”
In short, our approach is:
A full-body evaluation
Designing a plan with the client
Adjusting the plan according to the results
Are you dissatisfied with the cookie-cutter approach to the treatment of pain and injury in traditional healthcare? Do you deserve better?
Book an appointment to start with a comprehensive 90-minute physical therapy body evaluation.
