There are few things that are more rewarding than watching your children excel in something they love. However, on occasion things can take an unexpected turn. Sometimes unexpected injuries can occur which can have a wide range of consequences. Injury prevention and recovery can also take many unexpected forms.
Recently my daughter, who is a freshman in high school experienced what she thought was a season ending injury. She is a Varsity Cross Country runner and was, half way into the running season performing well. Her training mileage and times were solid and she was performing well in her meets.
She came home after practice recently and said she'd been to the trainer. She was experiencing some severe pain in the arch of her foot. Running became almost intolerable. Walking wasn't much better. We were no longer thinking about injury prevention for the season, we were thinking if salvaging the season due to this injury was even possible.
The coach and trainer were concerned she was dealing with either plantar fasciitis or a stress fracture. Both would put her out for the rest of the season. Regardless, we approached the symptoms with what athletes do when an injury strikes. RICE.
RICE is the go-to solution after an injury for many athletes. But is RICE the best alternative to dealing with a soft tissue injury? Maybe not. Plus RICE does nothing for injury prevention in the future.
My daughter ran this past weekend in a large invitational meet. As she passed me with 1.5km to go, she was in tremendous pain. I could see it on her face and in her gait. She crossed the finish line well outside of her goal time.
As we drove home from the meet, all I could think about was that this injury may not be what everyone thinks it is. As an endurance athlete myself, I have had to deal with pain in one place tied to an underlying injury somewhere else. My gut and experience told me this was the case here.
Pain is common for athletes of all shapes and sizes, ages and genders. Recovery as you age gets harder and takes longer. But what about an otherwise healthy 15 year old distance runner? How can you go from a season ending injury to being ready to compete in Sectionals in two weeks?
By looking at the problem differently. While RICE is a great way to reduce the impact of an injury, it doesn't do all that much in the way of assisting with regeneration. RICE is a defensive treatment. We needed an offensive treatment. Enter Daily Balance.
We were aggressive in our application of the Lineage performance & recovery cream applying it to targeted areas, namely the arch of her foot, her heel and calf, hip flexors and lower back.
Huh? Hip flexors? Lower back? Yes. You read that right. It is ALL connected. The goal was to decrease internal tissue inflammation. Flood the impacted muscles and tendons with the important nutrients critical to healing and further injury prevention.
Interestingly Daily Balance has as an ingredient Frankincense. Frankincense is a very powerful natural delivery mechanism. It's like Fed-Ex for other Daily Balance's many other ingredients including Basil, Arnica montana, Magnesium and CBD among many others. Targeting Daily Balance in these areas gave her tissues the tools needed to regenerate.
This was only part of the solution. The other part was to find the source of my daughter's debilitating foot pain and to do that, we had to look elsewhere.
So I booked a session with a holistic body practitioner. The closest description he offers up is modified trigger therapy. Recently I turned him onto Daily Balance. He now uses it to treat the trigger therapists who come to him along with his professional and endurance athlete clients.
Working backward from the feet, he found that the pain was the result of a degenerative set of underlying injuries caused by a lack of proper stretching and lots and lots of distance running compounded by poor posture and a heavy school book bag slung over her right shoulder.
Injuries and pain are not always in the same place
My daughter's foot pain was the result of 2 pinched sciatic nerves, hip ball-joint mis-alignment, her right shoulder scapula pushed out of alignment, tight right rotator cuff and three slightly dislocated ribs on her right side. This had tightened her left Achilles and heel tendons which in turn had tightened the muscles around her left ankle, causing significantly reduced mobility. And, all of this manifested in agonizing foot pain in her arch. But nothing was wrong with her foot.
We are now four days out from her last run and two days out from her trigger therapy session. We have been applying Daily Balance 3 times a day to her Achilles, ankle, lumbar, hip flexors, thoracic spine region and shoulder. Her foot pain has gone from a 10 to a 2.
Rather than get her back into her running shoes immediately, we decided to amp up her swimming routine for the purposes of keeping cardio strong but also to help strengthen and elongate her muscles in ways that differed from running as her body regenerated over the next week. This would put her back into a place where she could compete to win but also not suffer another injury.
In working to help my daughter recover quickly, we kept these few things in mind that I'd like to share that assisted with regenerative recovery and will assist her going forward with injury prevention.
