What Can Be Done to Speed Up Injury Recovery
Over the average lifetime, everyone will break at least one bone. Factor in the minor ailments and injuries a person faces throughout their lives, and you can expect to have almost 250 pulled or strained muscles in your life.
For others of us, more traumatic injuries are at stake. The average person will have four serious hospital visits throughout their life.
But no matter the injury, the recovery process is a challenging one. Everyone wants their injury recovery to occur as quickly as possible so they can get back on their feet.
Below are the best ways that you can speed up the recovery process and return to your life.
Eat the Right Diet
What you eat plays a crucial role in your recovery. The majority of your immune system is located in the bacteria in your gut.
During injury recovery, make sure you’re eating ample amounts of:
- Probiotics
- High-fiber foods
- Fruits and vegetables with high vitamin content
- Fatty acids
- High protein
Great anti-inflammatory foods to include are turmeric and ginger.
Your main enemy during recovery is processed foods and foods with high artificial sugar content (sugary foods like fruits are okay). These foods will increase inflammation in your body, which will make your injury feel worse.
When in doubt about your diet, always go for plant-based options and protein sources from fish and white meat.
Try Supplements
Certain supplements will also aid in your recovery process. Consider adding some of the following into your daily routine.
Vitamin C
Vitamin C helps with the production of collagen in the boy. Collagen has anti-inflammatory properties that will improve circulation around your injury, make it less painful, and help to rebuild tissue.
Vitamin D
Vitamin D is a hormone that helps to regulate important processes in the body. It plays a key role in regulating our gut.
Some of Vitamin D’s crucial roles include regulating bone growth, density, and remodeling. It also helps muscle repair and has even been shown to increase muscle strength in some cases.
Omega-3
If you’re suffering from a sports injury, studies have shown that Omega-3 is especially effective for head trauma.
Research shows that Omega-3 fatty acids help to reduce the severity of or aid the recovery from mild traumatic brain injury.
Engage in Physical Therapy
Here’s what you should know about physical therapy: it’s one of the best ways to speed up recovery and help with pain management.
Physical therapists use special techniques that help the muscle or tissues regain function and become less inflamed.
If an injury doesn’t heal properly, it leads to chronic pain later. Physical therapy uses methods to manage this pain to restore blood flow to the area and reduce pain.
Many physical therapy sessions last from 6 to 8 weeks and can lead to complete or at least partial recovery.
Get Ample Rest
You likely know that every adult should receive 8 hours of sleep a night – 7 at the very minimum.
This number becomes even higher when you’re injured. Your body needs growth hormones to be released in great amounts when your body is healing from an injury, and these hormones are only released during the ‘deep sleep’ phase of your sleep cycle.
The longer you spent asleep, the more ‘deep sleep’ phases you’ll have.
It’s common while recovering from an injury to take a nap during the day. Getting a little over 9 hours of sleep and taking about a 2 your nap will give your body time to complete the deep sleep cycles and have you wake up feeling refreshed.
Ample rest also means giving your injury time to heal without pushing it too much. It’s difficult to have an injury in an area of your body that you frequently use, like your leg or your back.
But if your push it too hard to return to normal function, you’ll end up straining it more and prolonging your injury.
Receive Regular Massages
Massage also plays an important role in injury recovery and rehabilitation. When you massage a certain area, you relax the muscles and encourage circulatory movement.
This helps your body pump more oxygen and nutrients into the tissues and vital organs surrounding the injury. The injured area becomes more flexible and can heal more quickly.
A study from Harvard tested the effects of massage on mice with injuries. It used a custom-designed system to deliver compressive forces to mice’s leg muscles, which rapidly cleared immune cells of injured muscle tissues. It also removed the inflammation in the muscles.
The results of the study show promise for regenerative properties throughout the body, the healing of injuries being one of them.
Relieve Stress
There is no question that stress wreaks numerous physical and mental damages to normal function. Stress can lead to chronic anxiety, poor decision making, lower sleep quality, and feelings of loneliness or being overwhelmed.
When you’re suffering from an injury, those feelings of stress will only become more pronounced as you adjust to a new lifestyle and have to face new limitations.
Although it is difficult to remain calm and hopeful in the face of an injury, doing so will promote a faster healing time and make you feel better during healing.
Ways to reduce stress include meditating, journaling, playing with a pet, and helping others.
While you may feel that you’re in an unlucky place because of your injury, realizing all that you do have will help you feel less stressed. Keeping a 5-minute daily gratitude journal can increase long-term wellbeing by 10%.
Speeding Up Injury Recovery
Injuries can be extremely difficult to recover from – and you deserve to feel your best.
We wish you the best of luck with your injury recovery process and hope that you will be feeling better soon. For more advice on health and wellness, visit the rest of our blog.
