While playing sports, either professionally or just as a hobby, accidents happen suddenly, causing minor or major injuries. While prevention strategies can help you avoid them, an unexpected collision when you make a wrong move can result in serious and painful injuries. Therefore, be ready to react as soon as this happens, and if it’s serious, seek medical assistance immediately. In that way, you protect yourself from the worst outcome, and if you’ve been through this, follow the article for some tips on how to heal from a sports injury.
React Immediately
Some sports injuries can’t be treated and healed at home, so you need to react quickly. For instance, it often happens that one sprains or breaks an ankle doing a usual exercise, and it can have certain consequences. For that reason, check out the valuable pieces of advice at Science of Rehab, and let the healthcare professionals help you heal the injury. A sprained or broken ankle can cause you a lot of trouble, especially if it isn’t treated as it should be, so don’t put yourself in danger of having serious consequences. Seek medical treatment, be disciplined, and take care of it in the future.
Make Use of the Rice Method
The “rice” abbreviation stands for rest, ice, compression, and elevation, which are major treatments for your tissue injury. The first step after the injury is to stop your activity immediately and rest for the first two days. Resting prevents any further injury, so this step is highly important. Further, apply ice for twenty minutes every three hours during the first days of being injured. The cold will prevent swelling and pain in your injured area. After that, wrap the injured area with an elastic medical bandage, which shouldn’t be too tight as to interrupt blood flow, and at the end, raise the injured body part because it reduces pain, swelling, and throbbing.
Allow the Injured Area to Heal
An injured body part will struggle to heal if you repeatedly use it after an injury. The pain in it is an excellent indicator that you don’t recover properly, so you shouldn’t ignore it. Often, the best possible option is to immobilize the injured body part and rest it completely to allow its complete healing. When you use the injured body part all the time, things might get complicated because an acute injury may become a chronic one, which could be difficult to heal.
Consult a Professional
Minor sports injuries typically heal and improve after two weeks of rest and a break from sport or exercise. A lack of improvement could be a sign you should consult a sports doctor, who’ll help you with clinical examinations and scans that will warn you to focus on a faster recovery with minor complications. Understanding your injury will facilitate your physical and mental recovery significantly. Also, you should consult your doctor about the exercise regime, which will help the healing process and ensure that appropriate milestones are achieved.
Food Can Help You
Just because you’ve injured yourself doesn’t mean you shouldn’t stay fit and healthy. First, if you’ve injured your knee, exercise your upper body with weightlifting. If you’re healing a shoulder injury, do some yoga or exercises for the lower body. Also, take care of the foods and supplements that can help the body heal faster.
Eat protein-rich foods like fish and meat, and eat citrus fruits, which are full of vitamin C that rebuilds tissues and has anti-inflammatory properties. Omega-3 fatty acids are great supplements you can find in chia seeds, salmon, and walnuts. As a result, choose your groceries carefully and avoid gaining too much weight, as this will also slow down your healing process.
Be Patient
This last step is often difficult when recovering from a sports injury, particularly over a longer period of time. Many athletes start their sports activities before they’re really ready, which often leads to re-injury and a much longer recovery period. One of the best ways to recover, among all the other tips, is to practice patience during the recovery and resist the urge to push your body too quickly. If you let your body heal at its own pace, you’ll be rewarded with a complete recovery and a bright future in sports.
In summary, a fast recovery from a sports injury requires discipline, medical expertise, and lots of patience. Seeking guidance from specialists while being responsible and careful not to further complicate the injury can make a significant difference in recovery time. Therefore, try to avoid negative thoughts or wrong tips from people who can’t help you, and your healing process will be easy and complete.