Injured? do you rest or push on through?

I would like to start by congratulating Emma Wilson who completed the South Downs Marathon in one piece, last week I mentioned Emma in the blog, and how hard she had trained for it, as her trainer I am extremely proud of her efforts. Unfortunately she took off on holiday before I managed to get full details of her time, however, I will update our bulletin when she gets back.

So, back to injuries, last week Tom, the man behind our bootcamp, managed to hurt his elbow, he came to me saying he couldn't move his arm and was in extreme pain when he tried. After a thorough inspection and the application of my magic touch, so to speak, we managed to increase his range of movement and get him doing some press ups. My diagnoses, over-use strain on the ligaments and tendons.

We had planned a short surf break to Devon and I assured him that the best thing for his arm was movement and controlled exercise, sure enough we went down to Devon the following day and scored some real sexy surf, with the odd head high set-wave coming through, the whole time I kept asking, 'how's your elbow mate?' to which he replied 'yeah good'!

Why you may ask is this so, well to put it simply, some injuries are show stoppers, like torn muscles and tendons and so on, and others, like the one Tom had, are the result of the bodies natural defence mechanism, Tom had a mild strain on the connective tissues in his elbow, however, the reason that he was in pain was because the localised area of muscle had tightened up, putting further strain on the connective tissue, therefore by moving those muscles constantly he was able to release the pressure on the connective tissue resulting in less pain.

I obviously wouldn't recommend we all go out injured and play an hour of football or tennis, because all injuries are different and only a professional consultation with a sports therapist or physio will help you to determine which is the right path of rehabilitation. This example, however, does illustrate that the age old mantra of rest rest rest, may not be the best option.

Be sure to take a look at our Sports Therapy section and should you have any questions please feel free to call me.

By Paul De Nagy