How to heal any injury and why YOU keep getting injured
I have to start off by first defining injury. Injury is the result of putting your body in an environment where it cannot survive. As a result of the body not being able to properly absorb forces- for whatever reason, it breaks. Think of injury as a relative scale 1–100. Everyone’s scale is relative to them. And as you get stronger and more resilient, it becomes harder and harder to break you.
I like to think of injuries like this because it is easy to explain. Let’s say modern day life is a 25/100 for you. Not strenuous at all, correct? But you come across a certain day when you go beyond your threshold of force (maybe a 75/100?) and boom you break. Now something crazy about pain is that it’s the first thing to appear and the first thing to go away. So yes, you could be injured for months (even years) without knowing that. However, in this situation I am talking more about acute (sudden) injuries.
The term “bulletproofing” has been popularized to mean injury proof. If we apply this to the injury scale it makes a lot of sense. If we can allow our bodies to adapt to even the most aggressive forces of life, then it will almost be impossible to injure us. Someone who plays basketball all the time is adapted to basketball, let’s say 60/100 has become the body’s adapted level, and anything over 70 is going to cause injury. During training sessions, we need to expose the body to levels of 80,90, and even 100. We do this very carefully- “controlled damage”. Overtime, the body adapts to stress levels of 80,90, and 100. So when we go back to play basketball nothing will injure us.
What about a car crash? Or jumping off a 200 foot building? Well again, this all scales and is relative to each person. In those cases, I believe those forces are too high, and the human lifespan isn’t long enough to adapt to those forces. This is one of those conversations that I can have for hours, but for times sake, the most extreme modern day forces come from that of sports. Allow the body to adapt to every range of motion, in every which way, the body will not get injured.
Ok so now let’s talk about how to heal any injury. Healing only has one speed. Everything we do nowadays just slows it down (poor sleep, symptom based care, poor nutrition, chronic stress, etc). In order to allow healing to express its greatest potential, we need to STIMULATE THE BODY GREATER THAN WHAT THE BODY UNDERWENT IN SAID INJURY. Stimulate the body greater than the stimulation of said injury. For example, a sprained ankle during a basketball game. In order to heal that injury to its full capacity and then some, you need to stimulate said ankle MORE than that of the injury. Meaning 1000s of movements everyday in the maximum range of motion provided to you by pain. Pain is a tool to allow us to navigate how much we can move to heal at the most optimal level. The reason you keep getting injured is because you’re not stimulating your body with the adequate forces to adapt to a level greater than what you were at prior.
Check out the video of me talking about this on my instagram griffin.health
Inspired by: Trevor Funk (trev_funk) on instagram, Tommy John (tommyjohniii) on instagram, and Brady Volmering (dacperformanceandhealth) on Instagram