Fuel for Healing

Giving your body what it needs can keep you healthy, help you achieve or maintain your target weight, improve your physical and mental performance, and improve your mood. “Giving your body what it needs” can include resting from physical activity, staying hydrated, and eating nutritiously. Unfortunately, performing artists can have a difficult time integrating these healthy behaviors into their daily routine.

Rest and hydration guidelines have been presented previously, so this article focuses on the importance of nutrition on injury prevention and recovery.

Using RICE to Treat Your Acute Injury

In the sports medicine world, “RICE” is a well-known self-treatment for acute soft-tissue injuries. RICE stands for Rest, Ice, Compression, and Elevation. Like most things in life (especially performing arts medicine), RICE should be used in moderation, as too much of even just one of the segments can hinder healing and potentially cause additional tissue damage. The exact length of each segment depends on the severity, location, and stage of healing of your injury.

The best time to apply all four components of RICE is several hours after a severe acute injury before you have the injury evaluated by a medical professional. Unless you are specifically told to do so by a medical professional, you shouldn’t need to apply RICE more than 3-5 days following a severe acute injury (assuming you don’t re-injure yourself).

The Body's 5 Distinctive Reactions to an Acute Injury

When an injury happens, the body has a set reaction called the inflammatory response, which is the first step in the body’s healing process. Swelling is a key component to the inflammatory response, but there are four other characteristic signs of inflammation, too: redness, heat in the affected area, pain, and dysfunction.

Exercising Doesn't Have to Hurt! Dealing with Muscle Soreness

Anyone who has exercised or participated in physical activity likely has experienced soreness associated with these activities at one point. Colloquially, “soreness” may be rather vague and used to describe a variety of sensations and conditions. So the physical fitness and medical fields use the term delayed-onset muscle soreness (DOMS) to describe the residual muscular pain or discomfort following unusual or excessive muscle use. As the name indicates, the soreness usually sets in anywhere from 1-5 days after exercise.

Resting from Activity

Many injuries need time off from physical activity to heal. However, this does not always mean completely stopping all activities and losing conditioning simply due to an injury.

Building Bone Safely

Bone injuries can be debilitating to the performing artist, but understanding how bone tissue grows, remodels, and heals can help direct preventative measures aimed at reducing the occurrence of injuries such as stress fractures.

Fitness in Dance

Despite the fact that dance requires just as much athletic ability and effort as most sports, dancers are not as physically fit or healthy as most athletes of a comparable age and skill level. (This is even supported by dance research.) For the most part, dancers have a lower level of fitness because they do not overtax their system (essential for building muscle and improving cardiovascular conditioning) during class and most rehearsals. A dancer who does not exercise outside of class and rehearsal will not be adequately prepared for the physical demands of performance.

What Dehydration does to Your Body

Practically everyone knows that it is important to stay hydrated while exercising in heat. But, did you know that dehydration is just as likely during physical activity in normal temperatures, cold weather, and even indoors?

Anaerobic and Aerobic Metabolism and Exercise

There are two types of metabolic systems used within the body to create energy for muscle contractions: anaerobic metabolism and aerobic metabolism. These metabolic systems are used to identify types of conditioning exercises, basing the classification of the exercise on the metabolic pathway supplying the majority amount of energy.

The most important difference between these two systems is the need for and use of oxygen to create energy. Anaerobic metabolism creates and uses energy without oxygen while aerobic metabolism, which converts glucose and fats into energy, must use oxygen.

Meniscus Injuries

Within the knee, there are two fibrocartilaginous crescents that sit on top of the tibia (the shin bone). These are the menisci. Their outer rims are thicker than their inner borders. They help to create a sort of seat on top of the tibia for the condyles of the femur. The medial meniscus is C-shaped while the lateral meniscus forms more of an “O”.

Yes, dancers, you actually can (and should) exercise outside of dance!

The most common misconceptions about exercise for dancers and why they’re wrong

Dancers – raise your hand if you’ve heard someone say that exercising outside of dance is bad for you as a dancer. (Ok, now put your hand down because everyone who can see you right now is trying to figure out what you’re doing.)

No single article can cover all of the misconceptions and flat-out lies that surround exercising for dancers, but this article will attempt to debunk the most heinous ones that rear their ugly heads most often.

Ice vs. Heat

Now that you know the effects of cold and heat on the human body, here is the answer to the ever-popular question, “Should I ice it or use heat?”

How Cold and Heat Affect the Body

You strain your hamstring doing a penche, so you put ice on it. Your muscles are achy when you’re lifting your sousaphone over your head after the first week of band camp, so you use a heating pack to soothe them. You know that ice and heat help, but how do they help?

Cold application (cryotherapy) and heat application (thermotherapy) are often used in athletic medicine at all levels, from weekend warriors to professional athletes. But why? Changes in temperature result in predictable physiological changes within the body. As you would expect, cold temperatures often result in different changes than warm temperatures do, but there are some changes, such as reduction in pain, that can be caused by either cold or heat application.

Is it a Sprain or a Strain? (part 2)

Find out the specifics of sprains and strains in this 2-part article

Part 2: Strains

There is a plethora of information surrounding sprains and strains. As a result, the information presented here has been split into 2 articles. This is part 2 – be sure to check out Part 1: Sprains.

What is a Strain?

When a muscle, tendon (what attaches muscles to bones), or its associated fascia is torn or suffers a stretching-based injury, it is called a strain. A tendon’s collagen fibers, which are what allow the tendon to become taut when its muscle pulls on it, break after a 6%-8% increase in length. However, a tendon is usually twice as strong as its associated muscle, so when a musculotendinous unit is strained, the injury is usually located within the center of the muscle (referred to as the muscle belly) or at the spot where the muscle fibers blend into the tendon (called the musculotendinous junction).

Is it a Sprain or a Strain? (part 1)

Find out the specifics of sprains and strains in this 2-part article

Part 1: Sprains

There is a plethora of information surrounding sprains and strains. As a result, the information presented here has been split into 2 articles. This is part 1 – be sure to check out Part 2: Strains.

The Basics

Sprains and strains are often discussed together and thought of as being essentially the same. This most likely is due to the fact that initial treatment for mild strains and sprains are so similar. However, there are differences between the two injuries, and the full course of treatment and rehabilitation after a severe strain is not the same as it would be for a severe sprain.

Debunking the Myths of Working Out

There are a myriad of myths and half-truths surrounding exercising and you’ve likely heard many of them – possibly even coming out of a friend or family member’s mouth. What follows is a list of the five most persistent misconceptions about exercising. You might be surprised by the physiology that challenges some of these beliefs.

The Healing Process

The inflammatory response, which is responsible for causing swelling right after an injury happens, is the first of three phases (or stages) of the body’s healing process. The amount of swelling and duration of the inflammatory response depends on the severity of the injury and the type of body tissues that are damaged.

The three stages of healing are often discussed separately, but the healing process is more of a continuum than a step-by-step procedure, and the various stages overlap each other without any true beginning or ending points. Because of this, time after injury is usually used to identify the stage of healing that a given injury is in (assuming that the normal healing process is taking place). It’s important to understand that the healing process needs to be uninterrupted in order for the body to heal properly and completely.

Swelling

Swelling is one of the body’s common reactions to injury.

But what is swelling?

It’s a collection of excess fluid that leaks out of the body’s blood vessels into the spaces between cells. It tends to accumulate in internal cavities within the body, like the area just in front of the bone on the side of your ankle when you have an ankle sprain (for you anatomy nerds: it’s called your sinus tarsi and it’s located anterior to your lateral malleolus). Despite the bad rap that swelling often gets, it’s necessary. It can help to protect the injured body part from further injury, and it kick-starts the healing process.

Now, swelling can identified as either acute or chronic.