It is not helping the healing process from injury and in fact, but it does the opposite! Other than temporarily numbing the sensation of pain, ice delays healing and recovery.
We’ve been told icing helps reduce harmful inflammation and swelling and even kick starts the recovery process after intense workouts.
But because the pain is decreased does not mean you’re fixing the injury. In fact, you’re actually doing more harm than good.
We’ve always been told that inflammation and swelling are bad things that we need to stop as soon as possible. These are not bad things. In fact, inflammation and swelling are normal responses to injury. Plain and simple, healing requires inflammation. It is an essential biological response following an injury.
If swelling is allowed to stay in a joint, it can have negative effects. However, swelling itself isn’t a good or bad thing. It’s simply the end response of the inflammatory cycle.
Ice does not facilitate clearance of swelling through the passive lymphatic system. While resting and icing may feel good in the short term, you’re trapping debris around the injury and stunting the natural healing process from occurring!
Performing pain-free exercise following injury has countless benefits. To start, muscle contraction enhances the inflammation process by improving macrophage function (the clean-up crew) and allowing these essential white blood cells to remove damaged cells. It also boosts muscle repair and regeneration and limits scar tissue formation.
Exercises performed in a relatively pain-free manner not only accelerate swelling removal through muscle contraction but also optimizes the healing process without causing additional damage.
Loading damaged tissue with proper exercises as soon as possible following injury actually accelerates healing of muscle and bone.
Directly after injury, the goal with movement is to facilitate healing without causing additional damage.
One of the safest muscle contractions for acute injuries and postop cases is isometrics. An isometric describes the action of muscle contraction without joint movement.
The smallest amount of muscle contraction can help remove swelling through the passive lymphatic system, prevent disuse atrophy by increasing muscle protein synthesis (helping you preserve muscle mass while you recover), and decrease pain. This is why simple exercises like ankle pumps can be so helpful for athletes directly after sustaining an ankle sprain.
If you’re extremely sore the day after an intense workout, I recommended performing a few minutes of soft tissue mobilization like foam rolling or with a ball.
Finally, optimizing healing mechanisms also means respecting the natural process, and therefore opting for an active approach. We therefore teach exercises of mobility (to gain amplitude), reinforcement (to gain strength) and imbalance (to improve proprioception) to ensure an optimal return to normal.
