The Science of Getting Slim

David J. Darner

While it’s fun to feel healthy and have an active life, there’s no denying that exercise is hard work, and hard work is well… hard.

It’s hard because exercise isn’t without its risks. The stress of getting to the gym, the park, or even your treadmill that’s 10 feet away makes exercise less about working out than working it into your schedule.

Perhaps the most notorious constraint of exercise is fatigue.  We tell ourselves, “Worked out hard on Saturday? Skip until Thursday!” But that’s a more psychological approach to fatigue.  The real danger is the physical issues that can come from neglecting workouts.

When avoiding working out becomes more about “ow that’s sore!” than “aw, that’s boring,” you need a recovery plan.

Don’t neglect injuries! Running, Soccer, Tetherball—you name it—can get risky from pain if you’ve injured yourself. Instead of waiting for injuries to correct themselves—diagnose them, treat them, and heal them.

Among the most common areas of injury are the ankles, but the range in their seriousness is wide. For example, this past month I was running through a forest while it was raining.  As the newly green leaves shaded me from most of the moisture, the trail was still very muddy and clouded with debris.

I trotted along until I stepped into a small hole covered by muck, like a soldier falling into a booby trap. I suffered a severe sprain, but I thought I was tough enough to limp home.

My after-workout treatment was a simple heating pad and quality television because, to me, it was just a mere ankle sprain, the type of injury that is more of a nuisance than a life threat. But I was surprised to still have pain after treating it.

Turns out using heat was the worst choice on the remedy list for ankle sprains.

This is because treating sprains with heat, like I did, complicates the injury by loosening an already over extended ligament. Heat is only supposed to be used for sore muscles, where the heat increases blood circulation and relaxes the sore, tightening muscles; unfortunately my injury wasn’t with my muscles, but my ligaments. And more unfortunate was my need for physical therapy because of the way I was recovering.

I visited the Ashton Physical Therapy Center off Cherokee Avenue in Alexandria and spoke with physical therapist Tricia Ashton.  She told me “If you’re recovering from a muscle injury, use heat; if you’re working on tendons and ligaments, use ice.”

“The difference,” she explains, is that “muscles don’t have the same blood supply as tendons and ligaments.” We continued to talk as she studied my injury and I found out that if I had sore muscles and a ligament issues, I could still use heat, but I would need to apply ice to my ankle if I wanted it to heal.

‘Trish’ taught me that a sprain in the ankle or other joint area occurs after your body abnormally moves a joint. It can be a lateral sprain, where the toe points inward and strains the ligaments on the outside of the ankle, or a medial ligament sprain, where the sole of the foot faces outward and damages the inward ligaments.

Further questioning about my ankle revealed the role of ligaments and tendons as “connections” for muscles as they form around the bone. Damaging the ligament damages how the muscle can be used, making it a very serious injury if you were to overextend one as it jeopardizes the stability of your movement.

What I had was an acute lateral ankle sprain.  To treat it, Trish told me to used RICE, which is as medical director of sports medicine at University of Wisconsin Craig C. Young writes, “Rest, ice, compression, and elevation.”

So how do you know when to see a doctor about a worsening injury? First, keep in mind that when diagnosing injuries, a key move is observing your initial recovery.  My sprain worsened from how I was treating it, and I was confident it wasn’t soreness since I was experiencing pain for weeks after.

Time is the key diagnostic tool here. Look for pain persisting well after the initial discomfort and to note any signs of “swelling of the ankle, pain with active ankle movement, inability to toe-raise unilaterally [side-to-side movement] with symmetry, and a [limp],” says university of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Michael T. Gross.

So remember: negligence may be fine when you’re ignoring a workout, but not when you’re ignoring pain. Everyone get’s injuries! Just don’t ignore them or you’ll cripple yourself!