Icing Your Woes: Ice Early, Ice Often
Table of contents for Icing Your Woes
- Icing Your Woes: Ice Early, Ice Often
- How to ice your muscles using an ice bag
- How to ice your muscles using an ice massage
- How to ice your muscles in an ice bath
- How to ice sensitive areas
One of the biggest mistakes that you can make is to ignore aches and pains when they are minor. Your body is very good at telling you things; the trick is learning how to distinguish between minor tears that are getting repaired and major tears that could lead to an injury. The easiest thing to remember is to ice early and ice often. When you finish a workout, your muscles have been torn. This signals your body to repair the muscles, and if the tear is bad enough and you have properly fueled yourself it will repair the muscle in such a way that the same workout will not cause as much damage. This is how we get better at any physical activity.
When you do too much too fast, or you twist something in a way that your body doesn’t want it to twist, you risk pulling a muscle or bruising a bone or causing a fracture. There are countless ways that you can hurt yourself. As you get more experienced in working out and you begin running more miles and doing more speed workouts, you have to be mindful of how you feel. In general, you should be able to tell the difference between being sore because of a good workout and being in pain because you have injured yourself. Any time that you are not sure, then ice the sore spots after your workouts.
There are different ways to ice your muscles, and I will get into them later. In general, you want to apply the ice to the sore spot directly after your cool down and stretching. When you are done icing, you will generally want to wait for 20 minutes and then ice again.
Icing your sore muscles will not heal an injury, but it could help to prevent one. When in doubt, apply a little ice. If you are just a little sore, then one round is probably enough. If it gets worse from workout to workout, then you should ice more and even consider taking an extra rest day or two. Icing your muscles can help you keep yourself on your training schedule, but pushing your schedule back a day or three now and again may help prevent you from pushing your schedule back a month or three.
This looks like good advice. In general, one of the things I have learned in the past year is that a bit of prevention can go a long way.
Yes, this is good advice. I’ve heard conflicting reports, though, on how long to hold the ice on the sore spot. 10 minutes? 15? 20? Ten seems doable, especially if you’re using frozen peas or corn. But I hear a lot of varieties.
I am actually going to expand on that, because how long you ice depends on the method that you are using to ice yourself. Look for that over the coming week or two.
[...] The first and easiest way to do that is to just grab a bag of ice and slap it on your sore spots. Leave the bag of ice on your leg or joint for 20 minutes, and then take it off for 20 minutes. Put a new bag of ice back on for another 20 minutes if necessary. [...]
[...] The second and my favorite way to do that is to give yourself an ice massage. In general, you do not want to ice for more than 20 minutes at a time using any method. When giving yourself an ice massage, you generally do not want to ice for more than 10 minutes at a time, and can often get by with about 5 to 7 minutes of icing. [...]
[...] An ice bath can consist of using a full sized whirlpool type contraption, or by dumping a bag of ice into a bucket of water. With a bucket, you can immerse your feet. With a full whirlpool, you can immerse as much of your body as you want to. In general, you should not immerse more of your body than you have to in order to completely cover the sore muscles in water. [...]
[...] Ice Early, Ice Often. [...]
After 36 years of near-daily short distance running, I am off the pavement and treadmill. Hate exercise bike. Top surface of my feet (not the joints) is sore, particularly at pressure points. Running shoes aggravate this conditiion. Clark shoes are only ones that I have found that I can wear. Dr’s offer no help. Am now soaking feet in cool water in a vibrating foot massager each morning for about 10 minutes. Seems to be helping a bit. Warm water aggravated condition. Any suggestions? My 86 year old feet need additional help. Want to get on pavement again in time for our Indy 500 Mini Marathon training for next year. Missed last three years. Legs and joints are very good. General health is very good.