Injuries and Training.

Last week I sprained my ankle in a spectacularly mundane fashion. It was during a test, and I was demonstrating a drill where the subject is attacked by surprise by one of several attackers. It went really well, just about flawlessly in fact. After a few go-arounds I said the fateful words,”Okay, now you try”, and stepped aside.

As I stepped aside, I rolled my ankle with a crunching sound reminiscent of many knuckles in symphony. I managed to get my weight off of it quickly, averting total disaster, but I knew it wasn’t going to be my day. 

It’s a couple days later, and the swelling has gone down mostly, and I’m ready for the next phase. The first few days I used the R.I.C.E. protocol – Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation – and it worked well. For my classes the next day, I did my best taping job (with the help of my six-year-old) and it held up nicely. 

Now that the swelling has gone down and weight-bearing is no problem, I’m ready for M.I.C.E.

In this protocol, you replace Rest with Movement. The classic example is drawing the alphabet with my toe. It forces the ankle through its range of motion at every angle and prevents long-term stiffness. I’ve got this nifty purple stripe along the outside of my foot, but I can now walk with no discomfort, and can now focus on rehabilitation. 

There are a few factors I’m going to try to address in the process:

1.) Maintain Cardiovascular Fitness: This is going to be a challenge, but I need to keep this up. I’ve got some big plans in the not so distant future, so I can’t just skip that part. 

2.) Strengthen the ankle. Seems like a no-brainer, but I’ve got to strengthen the muscular structure of the ankle to make up for the damage I’ve certainly done to the tendons in my foot recently and throughout my soccer / running / martial arts career. 

3.) Proprioceptive training. I’ve got to retrain the ankle joint and the rest of me to keep track of where my body is in space. This will hopefully decrease the likelihood of these issues in the future. Ever see those folks using squishy disks to stand on while lifting weights? They are working on proprioception, among other things. 

Injury presents particular challenges with training. During training, there are a couple stages where I find there is the greatest risk for reinjury. The first stage is right after injury. You walk it off, try again, whatever, but the structures are weak and damaged. Listen to your body and treat your injury. The second most dangerous phase is when rehabilitation is nearly complete. When you feel you are just about 100%, wait a couple more weeks before pushing it. You feel so much better that you don’t realize that you can’t go 100% yet and then one dumb move later, it’s back to square one. 

If you pursue rehabilitation properly, you should be able to be back in the swing of things in a short period of time. At least I hope so. I’ll post updates to back it up. If you’ve had training injuries, how have you handled it?