Rehabbing Sports Injuries: Why Too Much Rest is Not The Best

Sometimes an athlete’s body needs a break from its usual training program, particularly when injured. The traditional R.I.C.E. protocol for dealing with both acute and overused athletic injuries involves rest, ice, compression, and elevation in the short term to allow pain and inflammation to calm down a bit.

But complete rest is rarely the best plan for healing. In fact, rest alone can do much more harm than good.

During a period of complete rest, the body adapts to non-use as the muscle structures protectively tighten up around the site of injury. The longer they stay that way, the longer they want to stay that way as joints, ligaments, tendons, and even your cardiovascular system lose much of the conditioning invested into them up to this point. This can leave an athlete ill-prepared to eventually return to activity and make re-injury more likely when they do.

A sports chiropractic approach to preventing and fighting injury involves relative rest — a modification of training that keeps workouts within the pain threshold while maintaining a workload as close as possible to your usual program. Relative rest allows the injured area to heal through activity so that recovery time is not wasted, but instead, used to address potential underlying issues that led to injury.

A relative rest plan can include:

• Physical therapy

• Targeted strengthening exercises

• Addressing physiological factors

• Graded exposure — gradually reintroducing the injured area to movements that resemble the sport

By staying active but lessening training volume, intensity, and/or frequency, an athlete can control any activity that might make the injury worse, but work within the pain threshold to make the eventual return to normal training easier and safer.

Sports chiropractic care involves using this training modification period to identify and address structural weaknesses, along with flexibility, range-of-motion, and other biomechanical issues that may have contributed to the injury.

Acute Injuries

Sudden onset injuries like hamstring strains, sprained ankles, and twisted knees involve therapeutic rest followed immediately by strengthening and conditioning exercises within pain-controlled ranges of motion. Functional sports specialists, such as those on your DTX Sports Medicine team, can assess the point in motion at which pain strikes to determine why it does, and then address compensatory motions compromising quality movement.

Overuse Injuries

Overuse injuries, such as those from running or throwing, sometimes require working backward from the point of pain to keep you active while you heal. If discomfort starts at mile seven or eight, or perhaps only on hills, it might help to try running shorter distances or on flatter surfaces and fill in remaining training volume with equally valuable, but less impactful, workouts.

If shoulder pain sets in after 50 pitches, a relative rest program might work to stay under that pain milestone and sub in cross-training methods to maintain shoulder and arm strength and stability.

Relative rest accompanied by a graded rehabilitation program allows an athlete to progress through activity and range of motion, leaving them less stress-averse when they return to full-out training.

Some injuries, particularly those that require surgery, will indeed necessitate a rest period before bearing weight or while allowing incisions to heal. However, whether it’s an overuse injury, acute injury, or post-op situation, complete rest should be kept to the safest possible minimum time.

Rehabbing a sports injury is an opportunity to return to sport stronger than you left. DTX Sports Medicine can assess your condition and formulate a comprehensive treatment plan to keep you active through rehabilitation and better prepared to return to training.