Chief Pillars of Musculoskeletal Rehabilitation

You are what you think, eat and do every day. Write it somewhere visible, look at it every morning and start your day with the intention to cover all three bases. It doesn’t matter what you know; it matters what you do. Action becomes especially essential when you are recovering from injury. We have simplified it for you and summarised it into three pillars of musculoskeletal rehabilitation.

Mindset

Have you been doing everything right; physio, rehab, nutrition and tried various recovery methods and still not getting better? The truth is that you should have started with your mindset. Our thoughts affect everything in our body. For example, ongoing negative thoughts cause chronic inflammation in your body, thus hindering the recovery process. 

Furthermore, you need to use your mind actively to create new neural connections between your brain and your muscles to restore optimal function post-injury. Your thoughts are so powerful; they can change the expression of your genes! And yes, you can heal yourself using the power of your mind. It’s not witchcraft. There’s lots of neuroscience research proving this theory.

So how do you go about this? Learn how to meditate, practice positive thinking, use visualisation when training and watch or read Joe Dispenza. If you are feeling a bit overwhelmed and unsure that you can do this on your own, hire a good meditation coach or hypnotherapist.

Nutrition

The food you eat is a building material for EVERYTHING in your body; your brain, bones, muscles, hair, skin, nails…every single cell. My dad always used to tell me: “You can’t build a palace from crap.” Meaning, you can’t expect to be healthy and recover well if you are overloading your body with toxins from junk food that does not give you any of the nutrients you need to heal and flourish. Healthy diet aiming at bringing down the inflammation in your body is your number one priority when it comes to post-injury nutrition. The base is not rocket science - eat fresh whole foods diet with no added sugar, cut out junk food, processed food and alcohol and drink plenty of water. Once you have that covered, the number one supplement to help you recover is collagen. 

Best Way to Consume Collagen

• Get a good quality collagen supplement that has at least 10g of collagen peptides per serving 
• You can drink bone broth every day and make your collagen snacks and foods from bone broth and gelatine.

Just six weeks of collagen supplementation before every rehabilitation session lead to measurable increases in tendon strength in research using injured football players as subjects. Their joint pain was also completely gone after the six-week trial. 

Exercise

When you get injured, your body goes in the ‘protection mode’ and starts using different muscles to avoid the pain. As long as you are injured, as weaker the neural connections between your brain and the injured tissue will become. The injured muscle will also lose its strength gradually after two weeks of not using it. You need an excellent rehabilitation program to regain the losses in power and retrain your brain to use the correct muscles. Not being diligent with your rehab or skipping it altogether is likely to result in re-injury due to the imbalances in your musculoskeletal system. 

To make your rehabilitation program more effective, you need to engage your brain while exercising. Visualization is our number one tip for a speedy recovery. It takes about six weeks to create new neural connections between your brain and the injured muscle. Talk to Chief partner physiotherapist Brendan McGovern about your rehabilitation as well as prehabilitation needs.