Why Do Some Sports Injuries Take So Long To Heal Or Keep Recurring, Despite All Attempts At Rehabilitation?
Is getting injured, being in pain and struggling for months or even years to recover just the price we pay for being highly active, pushing ourselves in competition or just having a good time? It doesn’t have to be!
1- Although some of these injuries are inevitable, many are not—some, especially cumulative types like Tendonitis, are entirely preventable, (but not necessarily just by stretching and warming up properly.)
2- Many athletes and active people have in common certain “neuromuscular imbalances”—that can be easily reversed—but which will, if not corrected, tend to become more extreme as the years go by, causing the same aches, pains, limitations and injuries with frustrating predictability.
3- Faster, easier, new ways to speed the healing process and ensure a fuller recovery are now available when one is injured—It doesn’t have to be such a lengthy, painful struggle.
If you want to be more empowered in your recovery process, gaining a better understanding of how your muscles heal is the place to start, because:
- Muscular healing is much more complicated than commonly thought…
- Muscles need a lot more help to fully recover than commonly thought…
- And every sports injury is a muscular injury…
Meaning that, for the most part, you can’t break a bone or sprain a ligament without injuring muscle too. Your muscular system will tend to fail first—and even if it doesn’t, your muscular system will quickly become imbalanced in compensating for the injury.
Why Your Muscles Have To Heal Differently Than Your Bones, And Why Your Muscles Are More Prone To Healing Problems
If you fracture a bone, as long as it is set and held in place properly, it will tend to heal without further assistance, in such a way that it ends up stronger where it broke than it was before the fracture.
Bone tissue heals with calcium and other minerals, components of bone, in a process that creates a bond that is denser and harder than the original bone structure.
Denser and harder equals stronger, since that is the very definition of strength when it comes to bones. You want your bones to be dense, hard and relatively inflexible.
The definition of strength when it comes to your muscles, however, has to include flexibility and mobility.
Anything that would make your muscles too dense and inflexible would be a liability—and yet, that is essentially what happens in the initial phases of muscular repair.
Your muscles do not actually heal with just muscle tissue, but with “denser” substances including collagen. The resulting scar tissue is initially much less elastic, and consequently weaker and prone to re-injury.
Imagine a broken rubber band that has been glued and taped back together: The rubber band is whole again, but now it has a small area that is much less flexible (the repair.)
What if the rubber band broke repeatedly and was repaired in multiple places… How much of its original flexibility would remain?
This is one of the dilemmas of muscular healing.
Your body needs to repair your muscles without compromising their flexibility. This is a more complicated and delicate process than bone repair, where flexibility is not really an issue.
Your muscles, therefore, are more prone to having difficulties with healing: incomplete healing, loss of strength and/or recurring injury.
What Your Muscles Need In Order To Recover As Completely As Possible
In order for your muscles to function properly, all of their fibers need to be aligned in the same direction.
In the same way that your car wouldn’t be drivable if its tires were all aligned in different directions, your muscles wouldn’t work if their fibers were all pulling in different directions at once. The fibers have to be parallel.
When you have a muscle that has been injured however, the initial repair process creates a “patch” of random scar tissue fibers, and like a weak link in a chain, the random alignment and reduced flexibility of these new fibers becomes a “weak link” in your muscle.
If the healing process does not progress far enough beyond this point, the injury will leave your muscle in a perpetually under functioning, weaker, less-flexible state that is highly susceptible to re-injury.
In order for your injured muscle to fully recover, the scar tissue needs to become aligned and integrated with the muscle fibers.
This doesn’t just happen by itself though—it requires movement and a certain amount of stretching (just the opposite of what bones need to heal.)
The right amount of movement, (which varies according to the injury) at the right time and intervals, repeatedly breaks up the scar tissue fibers in a beneficial way, and they gradually become realigned in the same direction as the rest of your muscle…
But even with all the best rehab. exercises and stretches, it can be a slow and painful process that remains incomplete after weeks or months of hard work.
Here’s how I help speed the process up as fast as possible:
And now let’s look at another issue that needs to be understood and addressed, if you want to be assured of the fullest possible recovery.
The reality is that, even when the scar tissue “integration process” is complete, your problems can continue, because…
Your Muscle Isn’t The Only Thing That Gets “Damaged”
Traditional forms of rehabilitation often fail to restore full function, because they tend to fixate on the individual muscles (and other tissues) that have been injured. (The “hardware,” so to speak.)
It’s not enough to focus solely on trying to stretch, strengthen or otherwise rehabilitate your injured muscles—because the “damage,” or disruption, is also to your “software,” the movement programs in your brain’s Motor Control Center.
(Your “Motor Control Center” is simply the part of your brain that coordinates all your body’s movements, as well as your alignment and balance—Think of it as your “Movement Command Center” if that helps—MCC for short, either way.)
When you injure a muscle, it gets reflexively “shut down” to protect it from further harm and your MCC begins to adapt your movements to avoid overusing that muscle. This is the beginning of a distorted movement program.
And distorted movement programs are like bad habits—once you develop one, they can be very hard to “break out of.”
One consequence is that you lose full conscious control of your injured muscle—not totally, of course, you can still move it, but you don’t have your full strength or flexibility – And you’re compensating like crazy! (Sound familiar?)
And although movement is essential in realigning the scar tissue, (which we talked about earlier) trying to get your full power and mobility back by way of strength-building exercise can easily become an exercise in futility.
Unless the distorted movement programs in your brain (the “software glitches”) are corrected too, any progress gained by treating your muscles alone will often continue to be temporary or incomplete.
It tends to feel like an invisible wall you just can’t seem to get past in your rehab efforts.
Fortunately, you don’t have to go on struggling this way…
Here’s a detailed, interesting article about how that works and the therapy I use to help you get through it faster:
The Solution, Not Only To Your Injury Or Pain Pattern…
By treating according to these newly-discovered principles, not only can stubborn, difficult-to-heal injuries and pain patterns finally be laid to rest, but…
The underlying imbalances that allow many of these problems to occur in the first place can be corrected as well.
And as an athlete or highly active person, this means you can look forward to:
- More evenness is your stride,
- More power in your swing,
- Less risk of future pain and injury,
- A greater sense of balance, flexibility and coordination in all your movements…
AND the increased confidence that comes with all of this.
Also, if you have been protecting, favoring or otherwise not fully trusting part of your body, because of repeated injury or chronic pain, you may be surprised to find yourself liberated of the need to guard that area.
To sum up, the key to a swift, lasting recovery from muscular injury is in:
Helping your muscle’s scar tissue integration process so you regain full muscular flexibility and the scar tissue is prevented from becoming a weak link in the chain – More on that at:
And “re-coordinating” your brain (your Motor Control Center) with your muscular system so your injured muscle gets “turned back on” again and you regain full power and conscious control – More at: