How to Properly Ice your Hands for Boxing Injuries

Have you ever injured your hands from boxing, MMA training or maybe getting up to no good on a night out and fighting outside? I've seen that a lot in my time in the emergency room. The chances are if you have done this, you've hurt your hands and you've been told to ice your hands. But what does that really mean? Grab a bag of frozen peas, put them on the injured area, put in ice cubes in a tea towel or put in ice directly on the injured area. And if it is one of these methods, how long do you do it for? 5, 10, 15 minutes? There's a lot of ways people say to do this. So on this video, I'm going to give you the best way to ice your hands so you can return to boxing or even just have pain-free hands faster than ever. My name is Sarah Jeffries. I'm a registered nurse here in Los Angeles, California with experience in emergency room nursing and education. I'm also married to Olympic boxer Tony Jeffries, who had to retire from a hand injury back in 2012. And we worked together to prolong his retirement by trying all sorts of stuff with his bad hands. So I have a lot of experience on this topic. So what happens when you've injured your hands? Well, when a joint is injured, in this case we're talking about your hands, or even when you pull a muscle, stretch a tendon or burst a blood vessel, this injured area starts to swell. And it's swelling because your body's inflammatory response system has been triggered from the injury. This means that blood cells, fluids are being sent to the injury to repair the damage, which can make it increase in size and hurt. Before I tell you how to ice your hands correctly, I just want to tell you why ice is so good. Like I mentioned just now, our bodies have something in place called the inflammatory response system. Now, the problem with this system is that sometimes it overreacts and ice works by slowing down this overreaction because the overreaction that our body does can actually limit the healing process. It sends far too many unnecessary fluids in the direction of the injury, causing like a traffic jam, while actually it cuts off oxygen supply to the cells in that injured area that need the oxygen to function. And that is where icing the injury, also known as cryotherapy, comes in handy. When you put ice on a part of your body that's inflamed, the tissues and the blood vessels vasoconstrict. That means they get smaller and this limits how much blood and other fluids your body is sending to that area, giving your healthy cells a chance to breathe and do their job. But on the flip side, if you leave the ice pack on for too long, it can actually do more harm than good. If the injury site gets too cold, your body will flood in even more cells and fluids trying to warm it back up, even if you're still using the ice pack. This renewed blood flow is called hyperemia and that's why doctors say it's generally good to limit ice therapy to about 10 to 20 minutes at a time. A recent article from the Cleveland Clinic shows that ice is still the best thing for those acute injuries as it reduces the swelling without stopping your body doing its thing. But they did highlight that using ice in smaller periods of time is better. So now I'm going to tell you how we ice Tony's hands. But before I do that, I'd love to know about your injuries and what you tried to get over them. So let me know in the comments down below. This video is only for education and not a replacement for medical treatment. So Tony's way of icing his hands actually added time on his boxing career and was the best and fastest way for him to get straight back into training. You may have had what Tony had, which was bilateral boxer's knuckle, meaning both hands were suffering from intense swelling and pain and anytime he would hit something, his knuckles doubled in size by swelling up and he immediately was told to do ice therapy. So he would fill a large bowl up with ice, top it up with cold water, place it on a table in front of him and sitting down, slowly placed his hands up past his wrists into the bowl and he would leave it there for one minute, then take it out for one minute and he'd do that 10 times in a row. So it took about 20 minutes in total. He did this after every training session when his hands would be sore and swollen and the improvement, it was unbelievable. They went from being so big down to like a reasonable size and he could move them around and the pain was improved. But Tony did say that it took at least four to six minutes of doing that for him to get used to it. It was really difficult to do in the beginning. And just a quick side note before I forget, while we're on the pain, pain with icing, the pain improves because the ice therapy disrupts the messages that are being sent to your brain. So when you get hurt, it's important to let your body do its thing and heal. Ice just helps to make sure your body doesn't overreact and keeps you a little bit more comfortable in the process. If cold therapy doesn't help your pain go away, you should contact your healthcare provider. Also, you may want to avoid cold therapy if you have certain medical conditions like diabetes, as that can affect how well you can sense tissue damage. If you want to know more about fighter injuries, click here for my top tips on how to prevent and treat the most common injuries seen in fighters.