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Getting hurt, even when doing a sport you love, isn’t fun. As painful as the foot or ankle injury is, the potentially long time spent on the sidelines recovering can be almost just as painful. You want to be out there on the field, helping your team get the victory.
With your injury, the busy schedule of practices and games suddenly come to an uncomfortable halt. You’re used to being active and it’s hard for you to lie low and take it easy. This inactivity is extra painful when you see your friends and teammates having fun.
Fortunately, regardless of what kind of foot or ankle sports injury you’ve sustained, today’s advanced orthopedic technology has made recovery time shorter and treatment more effective. This isn’t to say that all foot and ankle sports injuries can be treated and cured overnight. Some such as sprains and broken bones still take a few months to completely heal.
We often take our feet and ankles for granted until we injure them and our mobility becomes compromised.
Get Treated Quick By a Professional
The first thing to do if you want to fast-track your sports foot or ankle injury is to see a licensed podiatrist and have him or her diagnose the problem. The sooner you have your injury treated, the sooner it can begin to properly heal.
Putting off treatment in hopes of just toughing through the injury can keep the injured part of your foot or ankle from recovering and healing and may even cause additional foot or ankle problems to occur.
A foot and ankle specialist, like Advanced Foot and Ankle Center, will have advanced diagnostic and treatment technology in addition to expert foot and ankle specialists to provide patients with the best, most effective treatment possible for their sports injury.
At Advanced Foot and Ankle Center, we utilize advanced technology in order to help us more quickly diagnose issues while also being less invasive. Some of our treatments include digital x-rays and ultrasounds, video conferencing and shockwave therapy for tendonitis.
Your sports injury may not have been the result of a sudden, traumatic event, but from an underlying foot or ankle misalignment problem that has come to a head.
It’s amazing how something as small as a foot arch or toe misalignment can have such a huge impact on your life. At Advanced Foot and Ankle Center, we have orthotics specialists who will work with you and customize your very own, durable, high-quality orthotics. We offer foot and ankle orthotics made of thermoplastics, carbon fiber, metals, fabric, EVA and elastic that provide the specific purpose of alleviating your sports injury pain and discomfort.
Deep Tissue Massage
A deep tissue massage often takes some getting used to as they are rough and painful. With these massages, muscle tissue located deep within the muscle is worked. The massaging of this deeper tissue can give it much-needed additional blood flow which reduces stiffness, pain, and discomfort and helps speeds up the healing process.
Hot Cold Treatment
You may have heard or seen people going back and forth from a hot jacuzzi to a cold swimming pool and think they are crazy. The reason behind their madness is that the extreme shock in the water temperature differences improves blood flow. The increased blood circulation is crucial in the healing process. Regardless of whether the wound or injury is inside or on the outside of the body, blood carries important nutrients to the injury site. Blood is also crucial in clotting the wound opening to prevent germs and bacteria infecting it.
An ice bath followed by a hot shower or even a shower in which you alternate the water temperature between cold and hot can open blood vessels in the legs, ankles, and feet, aiding in the healing process of your sports injury.
Nutrients
A healthy diet is important for a speedy recovery. Some nutrients that are great for bringing healing from a sports injury. These contain electrolytes, calcium, lutein, collagen, whey, white willow bark, unsweetened cherry juice, valerian root, ginger root, turmeric root, feverfew leaf, and bioflavonoids. These minerals, nutrients, and compounds are effective in rebuilding and restoring damaged bones, ligaments, muscles, and joints.
Whey, for example, limits the build-up of calcium in the joints and arteries, lutein and collagen provide strength, support and flexibility and cherry juice, ginger, turmeric and valerian root are great antioxidants and anti-inflammatories.
Rest
This may be one of the toughest sports injury strategies as it forces you to either greatly limit or eliminate your physical activity. Playing a sport for many years to suddenly having to lounge on the couch for a few weeks to a few months can be difficult.
While it may be tempting to speed along the healing process by continuing to be active and using the injured foot or ankle, this will slow the healing process and may even make the injury worse.
Your bones, muscles, joints, and ligaments need adequate rest for healing and restoration to take place. The more rest you have, the more time your body has to recover and heal, speeding up the recovering process.
Sports injuries are not fun and while there is advanced technology available, these injuries can still take multiple months to fully recover.
If you’ve recently suffered a sports injury, contact us at Advanced Foot and Ankle Center to schedule an appointment with one of our podiatrists to help you get a start on a faster recovery.
