How to deal with injury

Injury is a part of sport, exercise and being active. It IS going to happen. It happens often sometimes and other times you have a long stretch of being injury free.
How you deal with injury is important for fast and complete recovery. Now I understand that injury is a large scope and this will not ring true to all, but for the general sake of helping, for basic soft tissue injuries, here are a few tips on how to best handle them.

1. If you are truly injured, or think you may be, go get diagnosed!! For goodness sake, go!! How do you know how to help yourself get better if you don’t know what is broken?

2. Don’t be macho (guys). Working through the pain can make an injury more serious. Better yet, don’t be a wimp either. Know the difference between muscle soreness and injury. If you don’t, start paying more attention to your body!

3. Get a massage!! From a qualified, professional Registered Massage Therapist. This should be a part of your injury prevention protocol already anyway, right? Massage speeds healing time, making you better, faster!

4. Ice the heck out of it! Now I know there are current studies showing that ice doesn’t work, well, from experience, it does. So, ice the heck out of it!!

5. Seek out a soft tissue specialist to help with timing of stretching, strengthening and back to training protocols. A CEP (certified exercise physiologist) or CSCS (certified strength and conditioning specialist) should be able to help.

6. Finally, don’t dwell on it. The longer you feel sorry for yourself the longer it will take to heal. This is normally due to slight depression which makes people not follow through with protocols and rehab. Stay positive, set new goals and push forward!

Remember, injuries will happen. How you deal with it will be the difference between back on track or off the track!!

Stay strong YYC!!

Massage increases performance.

In the past 18 years of being a sports massage therapist/trainer, I have seen a lot. One of the most profound things I have seen is the increase in athletic performance in ‘athletes’ who receive regular massage treatments. Now, the theory is that massage increases performance by up to 20%. And understand that it is just a theory as doing study’s on massage is extremely difficult with so many variables to consider. But, I have seen it first hand. Along with a decrease in injury time, massage helps to keep muscles functioning properly. Breaking down the ‘injured’ tissue and allowing it to be flushed out for faster recovery time and increased gains in speed, strength, power, agility and flexibility!
Be nice to your body and keep it functioning at a high level.
Massage can be done as often as 2-3 times a week or as little as (depending on your activity level and other factors) once every 4-8 weeks.
Allow yourself to reach the highest potential possible and take care of that exercised/stressed out body with some awesome massage!!
Stay strong YYC!!