Injury Recovery 101: Inside and Outside of the Octagon

Anyone who has played at any level of sport, from casual rec leagues and 5Ks to the peak of competition as a professional and/or Olympic athlete, knows muscle injuries are a fact of life. As many of us know, a muscle injury can keep us from maintaining our training and gains. Muscle injuries can also impact physical and mental health due to disruptions in schedules, daily functioning, and general quality of life. Practicing self-care, assessing injury severity, and taking control of the rehabilitation process are all key to ensuring a quick and complete recovery.
Because the injury process can exact a heavy burden on the body physically and biologically, a well-designed rehabilitation plan that combines external physical treatments, such as massage, compression, and cooling therapies, along with internal biological strategies, will help 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 muscle injuries so you can return to your pre-injury level of competition.
Physical and nutritional therapies should be designed to beneficially impact key injury variables like inflammation, pain management, immune function, and tissue repair. 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.”
Physical Strategies: External
The UFC Performance Institute recommends the “POLICE” method.
- Protection – Protecting a new muscle injury allows you to prevent worsening the damage and prolonging recovery time.
- Optimal Loading – Balance 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 supports pain relief and allows for the ability to exercise and rehab an injured area. Shorter and more frequent cooling sessions are recommended over longer sessions.
- Compression – Applying compression 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.
Nutrition Strategies: Internal
The UFC Performance Institute prioritizes its nutrition considerations into five categories:
- Energy – Total calorie requirements need to be assessed. Daily calorie intake needs can increase by 1.2 times for a minor injury and up to 1.5 times for a severe injury. Although training volume might decrease following an injury, caloric demands must still be provided for.
- Protein – Protein intake should be increased. Consume about one gram of protein per pound of body weight per day throughout the day to best maintain muscle mass and strength during an injury.
- Micronutrients – Ensure your calories come from nutrient-dense, plant-based foods including “healthy fats.” This enables the body to consume a wide variety of vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients needed to promote wound healing and tissue repair.
- Sports Foods – Supplemental foods, such as protein and greens powders, as well as multi-vitamin/mineral supplements, help address your body’s energy, protein, and micronutrient needs, especially if appetite is poor.
- Supplements – After addressing the needs prioritized above, recovery, therapy, and rehabilitation can be enhanced with the addition of nutritional supplements like Thorne’s creatine monohydrate, omega-3 fatty acids, curcumin, probiotics, vitamins C and D and amino acids like leucine.*
Along with the above strategies, the UFC sports science staff recommends the following:
- Move – Begin physical activity and movement around the injured area as early as possible, pay attention to your body’s limitations, and consult with a health-care professional to guide your efforts.
- Rest – Because healing best occurs at rest, be mindful of ensuring your body gets ample physical and mental rest, paying particular attention to sleep. Accounting for extra rest will increase healing and shorten recovery time.
- Recover – Although the urge to push through pain and rush back to training can be intense, listening to your body and not rushing rehabilitation or returning to full training is imperative to remaining healthy, as well as decreasing the risk of additional damage or re-injury. Having a thorough warm-up and recovery routine is imperative to preventing injury and performing at your best. Warming up with the Hypervolt percussion massage gun, along with recovery in the Normatec dynamic air compression boots, can increase circulation to the impacted muscle groups and decrease swelling post-exercise.
- Seek advice – Sports medicine and sports performance staffs have expertise in different fields. Arming yourself with education and understanding how to implement your injury plan will ultimately lead to the best results. Hyperice, Thorne, and the UFCPI have a wealth of information in order to provide the advice and expertise that can guide your rehabilitation and get you back training and competing at your highest level.