Overcome injuries....

Today's Post:  Thursday, 5-22-2014                                                                       

A.  Prevent them!  It’s a cinch to fix injuries you don’t get!

1.  If you must ride a motorcycle, or a bicycle -- get a good helmet and always wear it even for the shortest trips!

The head injuries you avoid by doing this can save your life or prevent you from having disabling injuries you can’t recover from. 

Always wearing a helmet can enable you to walk away from an accident that would have killed you or ruined all the rest of your life.

Then do your best to ride safely in every way you can. 

If you ride a bicycle be sure you and your bike have reflectors AND both a steady light and a blinking one front & rear because most bad bicycle accidents at night are from people never seeing you.

2.  In a car, ALWAYS wear a seat belt. 

Paradoxically it’s the shortest most routine trips where the seat belt is most likely to make a difference between a severe injury and none at all.

And, because of the risk of that HUGE number of repetitions per year of such trips, that’s where most of your risk actually is!

At higher speeds, seat belts are less protective but they still prevent about half the deaths and reduce the severity of the injuries AND the medical bills about three to one!

3.  Don’t allow your car to move if you aren’t paying attention! 

People who must talk on the phone for business and learn how to dial out carefully enough and are able to drive safely AND talk – particularly if they have a hands free phone but only ONE ear is connected to it.

No one else who cannot drive that way using a cell phone should use a cell phone while driving unless it’s a very serious emergency -- and even then they should be extremely careful.

People who are so spacey while talking to friends on a cell phone that they drive through red lights or come close to running the people they don’t see off the road when they weave out of their lane ARE driving recklessly and in a grossly negligent manner. 

You can avoid injuries to you AND getting yourself into all kinds of trouble if you totally avoid doing this.

Texting is worse – MUCH worse – because you stop looking at the road and the oncoming traffic.  Driving with ice covering your windshield or most of it causes similar dangers.

Never, ever do it!

People who text while driving have a scary rate of very severe injuries and dying.  They also kill totally innocent people including little kids.  DO NOT do this.  Text before OR after your car is moving and never, ever WHILE it is moving.

Learn the skill of talking safely while talking on your cell and driving with attention at the same time if you must communicate.  If you must text, have someone else drive!

4.  If you do have three drinks or more, wait a few hours before driving; stay put; or have someone else drive.  (It’s best for health anyway to virtually never have more than two drinks a day.)

B.  Make injuries from sports and exercise far less likely:

1.  Superslow strength training, careful focus on proper form, and doing all exercises while paying attention and using care each make injuries less likely.

Injuries happen most often when you make an extremely fast movement that starts in a split second.

Superslow strength training prevents injuries by using a lighter weight that you can lift without that kind of start and by gradually adding the force for the first repetition until the weight moves but NOT starting that abruptly.

Injuries also happen when making an extremely fast movement to avoid falling or to catch a weight that got out of control and which use your muscles in ways that they are at bad angles.

Use good form and pay really good attention and use care while exercising to avoid this kind of injury.

2.  Would you like to cut your chances of injury from exercise and even being struck in half and also cut the severity of any injuries you do get?  

Would you also like to recover in half the time?

There IS a tested method to do this that is proven to work:

Football at the varsity level in even in high schools produces a lot of injuries.  Where the high school is in an area where there is a strong stress on having a championship seasons where the team wins most of its games every year this is even more the case.

In the state of Georgia in the Atlanta area, a local doctor who worked in a hospital had discovered that people who were badly sick or were injured recovered MUCH better and faster if they took 3,000 to 5,000 iu a day of vitamin D3.

He wondered if taking that much vitamin D3 would also help prevent exercise injuries and injuries from blows. 

So he had the local varsity football coach tell him the number of injuries in the athletes on his team during the previous season or two. 

Then he had him have all the young men on his team take that much vitamin D3 each day starting several weeks before the football season and keep doing it all that next season.

The number of injuries dropped to half as many!

If you exercise and take vitamin D3 you can have that same protection! 

Cutting your injuries from exercise in half is very desirable to do.

You also get all the many other health benefits from taking that much vitamin D3. 

 

B.  Do things that speed your recovery if you do get an injury:

1.  Taking 3,000 to 5,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 will help! In fact doing that and taking an extra 5,000 iu a day for the first week or even first month if it’s a broken bone or more severe injury HAS been shown to speed healing!   (That’s what the Georgia doctor had seen that caused him to test vitamin D3 as an injury preventive.)

2.  You may or may not be able to take the time and money to get a full body massage each day during the first week or two. 

But if you can, the dramatic increase in circulation to all parts of your body has been proven to speed healing!  This even works in the earliest stages when the injured part of you hasn’t recovered enough yet to stand up to being massaged!  Having the rest of you massaged sends that extra circulation to your injury too!

3.  In many cases you will still be able to do a strength training exercise that you use another part of your body to do. 

a)  If you injured your arm or shoulder or wrist, but you still have access to the leg press machine, by doing the heavier superslow motion strength training with that heavier weight releases enough growth hormone that your injury will be healed faster.

Similarly, doing bench presses or chest presses on the machine will work if you injured a leg or knee or ankle.

b) If you exercise a part of you that you have two of such as a knee or shoulder or wrist, do your regular strength training exercises that you were doing with both -- but on just the un-injured side.

Incredibly, even though you don’t stress or even move your injured part, your bilateral nervous system sends enough of the control and recovery messages to your injured part the same as it does for the side you ARE exercising that you retain MUCH more of your strength on the injure side while you let it heal.  And, it then heals and recovers faster too!

C.  If you keep getting the same injury, replace the exercise that caused the injury -- at least for several months -- or ongoing -- with one that gets the results you want but without injury!

a) My friend I were avid runners as young men. 

But he began to get knee injuries and pain. 

He switched to walking and then to using an elliptical trainer which worked for him.

b) And once I got older than 35, every time I’d done just enough running to get in really good shape and enjoy running because of it, my right Achilles tendon would get an overuse injury and cause problems when I used it and pain the rest of the time. 

After this repeated a few times, I switched to using a NordicTrack exerciser for my cardio.  I still use it.  And I now use three other kinds of interval cardio sessions each week and do the NordicTrack just once to avoid overuse injuries from using the NordicTrack.

I’m even increasing the intensity on two of those interval cardio sessions each week.

c) I was getting great results from having those two interval cardio sessions be doing the jump rope twice a week.

But it kept injuring and then re-injuring my shoulders.  I finally realized that without an in person coach to help me use better form and a getting a better jump rope, this was going to keep happening.

Now I do two other kinds of higher intensity interval cardio that do NOT stress my shoulders in this way.

I’d love to go back to running and jumping rope at some point even once a week each.  With better form and effective coaching to get there that may be possible.

But for now, I’m still fit and improving each month without running or jumping rope!

You can do something similar if you keep getting the same kind of injuries from your exercise program.