What’s up everybody! It’s Patrick Lerouge here from Evolve Restorative Therapy. You can find me at livepainfreeprocess.com. Today what I’m going to be talking to you about is the natural progression of the healing cycle. This is going to be kind of fun because it shows you the big picture and gives you an idea of what naturally happens within the body. What happens when you break a bone or sprain an ankle? Your body is going to go through a specific set of events to heal itself.

So, for example, when you break a bone in your leg, the body will first completely stop the area. It will block everything around it, so it will protect that area for all it’s worth. You are not going to be able to move that leg, because it does not want any more damage done to it. With a sprained ankle, the same concept applies. It’s going to stop the movement there because it doesn’t want it to do any more damage.

 

Next, it’s going to flood the area with blood, causing swelling. In a sprained ankle scenario, it still swells, but to a lower degree. That area will get full of pus and now is the time when it starts to do its work. This is where everyone starts to make their mistake by messing with their injurey. What you have to realize is that during the first few days of this process, you are going to have to allow the body to do what it needs to do. It may feel uncomfortable, you will have pain, and you are going to want to do something with it, for example packing it with ice. Yet the reason why it’s swelling it because it’s trying to repair itself. However, when you have a swollen ankle, you do want to contain it by keeping your shoe on. Get more blood flow to run through it by walking in whichever way is comfortable for you. Yet don’t take off your shoe, because as soon as you take off your shoe, it will get more swollen and that area will get bigger because now it has room to breathe. With a broken bone, you are going to have to let your bone set itself. That is why they cast you, to give the bone time to repair itself. With the sprained ankle though, you can now start learning instantly how far you can move it. At first it will be very small movements and eventually within days, you might get it to work a little bit better.

So now in the next phase, your body is rebuilding things. It will show you more heat, different sensations, and will be doing miraculous things. Healing is not a fun place, it’s a combat zone since things are dying and rebuilding. Now that you know it’s a war zone, you are going to expect things to be going on down there. With a broken bone, it’s to the same degree, but the more you are aware of what’s happening with your body, the faster your body is going to heal. So with a bone, you will put a cast on it and then ‘set it and forget it’ and let it go through its motions. With an ankle, you do the opposite and slowly start to work with it, which in turn is what can make it heal faster.

Now that it is rebuilding more, at this point, you can start actively doing more rehab based work. When you have a broken bone, you can start walking and putting small force on that bone, in incremental steps. Yet due to the cast, it’s harder to know where you are in the healing process, because you can’t really feel anything. So be very careful unless you are used to doing it all the time. As you put more weight on it, you will teach your bone to do things and it will construct itself incrementally.

In the last few phases, this is where your bone will start to heal more and you can put more weight on it. In the end, you’re going to have a really clean bone, although it will have scar tissue. It’s important to understand that if you do rehab work in the beginning stages, it can cause more harm here because the body has not completed its repairs. This is why knowledge is power, folks. Once you start realizing where you are, then you can start navigating. So now you can do work on it without having any fear. The more you play with it, it will start to get better and better. Yet with each one of these phases, comes a different timeline. With a broken bone, it will be a little while before you get it functioning again. With a sprained ankle, it could be a couple days or hours depending on how frequently you make it move, on your mindset, and how much you trust yourself.

It can move through the healing process relatively fast, you just need to know where you are on the whole scheme of things and you can make it go even faster. Imagine getting injured, and being able to get back into your activities again very quickly. Getting hurt is actually a good thing, if it’s done properly. If you know where you are, you can make it even better, because now your body is reconstructing and it’s doing so based on what you tell it in that particular phase. If you break something on a muscular level, it’s going to bind and try to protect itself. Yet it needs to move, contract, and communicate and in order to do this is must be worked with. The healing process has it’s steps, but the timing is all based on your mindset and the things you believe can do. Once you know this, you can speed through any injury because you know the healing process. This is true for a toothache, a migraine, and anything! It’s going to first lock down the area, then rebuild itself, there’s a loading phase, and then the end result where you can move again. If you loved this tip, share it. If you are not part of the family, please sign up. I would love to answer your questions. Until next time! Bye!