Rest is best (and the hardest thing to do).

You’ve injured yourself. F*&$#^@. Especially for my awesome athlete friends, this is worst case scenario. Our goal is to wake up and be better than we were the day before. No that doesn’t always happen, but we show up and put in our best effort to ensure that tomorrow and the next will reap the rewards of said effort. We don’t have time for injuries and strains because we have PR’s to chase and optimal health to achieve! This injury also means struggling through our jobs, getting meals ready, driving the kids to practice, and folding the 10th load of laundry. We all know, kids don’t slow down just because you have to. My daughter had informed me once that she was ‘tired of me being injured’. Me too, kid. Me too. Our bedtime story that night was about muscles and injury recovery and she fell right to sleep.

As a massage therapist, I would love to place my hands upon all injuries, summon whomever you worship, and heal all the things. I’ve tried, it doesn’t work. I can, however, ease some of the pain, give you some advice on how to recover and tell you which other professionals (i.e. physician and physical therapists) you should be calling to help you through this process.

Needing to keep up with my awesome athletes, I’ve been reading through my literature and articles to keep up to date on all matters injuries and recovery. I’ll give you one guess as to what they all say; REST. If someone said to me, ‘let’s go eat Mexican but you can’t have the chips and dip or order a margarita,’ I would remove them from my will because THAT is how I feel about rest. It’s not fun and we don’t want to do it. However, if rest and a rehab plan isn’t considered, the initial inflammatory response keeps repeating and the damaged cells aren’t able to heal and will continue to cause ongoing inflammation and pain. In most mild injuries or strains, you will recover and still do most things without issue and still exercise while you rehabilitate, but you will need to take a step back. I don’t mean for a day either. It’s usually multiple days and sometimes weeks. (Weeks without my chips and dip? I can’t do it. Will I still be able to order things off the menu and be better for it? Fine, yes.)

To conclude this long winded post, it is not a sign of weakness that you back off and take the time to rehabilitate, it is an investment your future-self will thank you for. I totally understand it’s no fun seeing your 401k come out of your paycheck but when you are retiring comfortably, you will be thankful. The same idea goes for your amazing body!