The injury process takes a toll on the body physically and biologically; a well-designed rehabilitation plan will combine external physical treatments, such as massage, compression, and cooling therapies, with internal biological strategies to ensure the body is meeting its caloric and nutrient needs to promote recovery and repair.
The teams at Hyperice and Thorne have teamed up with the experts at the UFC Performance Institute to provide some guidelines to give you a fighting chance to recover quickly from injury and return to your pre-injury level of competition.
As Clint Wattenberg, Director of Nutrition at the UFCPI explains: “The interplay of physical and nutritional therapies in supporting an athlete’s injury recovery dramatically improves the recovery and regeneration processes. This is core to the UFC Performance Institute’s philosophy of integrated care by demonstrating the opportunities available when performance sciences combine to provide an outcome greater than the sum of each individual part. Inflammation, pain management, immune function, and tissue repair are just some of the variables that both physical and nutritional therapies combine to influence to return athletes back to their sport more quickly and permanently.”
Physical Strategies: External
The UFC Performance Institute recommends the “POLICE” method
Protection – Protecting a new injury allows you to prevent worsening the damage or prolonging recovery time
Optimal Loading – Balancing resting an injured area to allow it to heal, while still challenging the affected area to return to normal function
Ice- Ice and cooling therapy (link) and applying cooling techniques, supports pain relief and allows the ability to exercise and rehab injured areas. Shorter, more frequent cooling sessions are recommended over longer sessions
Compression – Applying compression (link) around an injured body part helps reduce swelling, lessening the impact of swelling on function and rehabilitation efforts
Elevation – Elevating the injured body part above heart height while at rest helps drain swelling around an injury, which helps restore function.