7 Tips on How to Recover Fast from Injuries (Boxing and MMA)

Do you do boxing or MMA training for fitness or competition? Well if so you'll know that these sports are giving you a full body workout and when you're using your full body in anything you do I'm sure you'll agree this increases the chance of picking up an injury. If you have an injury or you've had an injury in the past then this video is for you. I'm going to give you some tips on how to recover fast from injuries so you can get back to doing what you love. I'm also married to Olympic bronze medalist and former professional boxer whose career ended due to injuries so I have a lot of experience in this area and I know that it's very rare for a fighter to get into the ring 100% injury free. There's often something going on. Also at the end of the video I'm going to tell you one thing that you can do to prevent a lot of these injuries that I see and this will also make you perform better in training too. So hang around for that. My name is Sarah Jeffries. I'm a registered nurse here in Los Angeles, California with experience in emergency room nursing and education. Welcome to my YouTube channel. For more videos like this subscribe and turn your notifications on so you don't miss any more videos. Before we move on I have to add this video is not for a replacement of medical treatment. So first of all if you have a severe injury that's causing you intense pain and you're not able to move around and get out of bed seek medical advice. We only have one body and we need to take care of it. Now the first piece of advice is often overlooked but in my opinion it's the most important and that's rest. Rest to recover. This is usually the hardest thing to do for fighters and athletes. I know you want to be training every minute of the day and you can't get the thought of your opponent out of your head and as every minute passes that you're not training you think you're losing valuable time but here's the secret. If you do not rest properly and you don't listen to your body you'll lose even more time by having to recover from a potentially bigger injury because you ignored the smaller injury by not properly resting. Let's look at a specific example. Take Conor McGregor in his last fight. I did a video about his broken leg and this is a bit on the extreme side because he could hardly ignore that injury. But let's just say he did and he ignored the experts and took the cast off early and didn't give his body time to rest. Extreme as it sounds he could have lost that leg but he did listen and he's smart and I hear he's doing very well and getting that leg strong again. Next is having a healthy diet. Make sure you're providing your body with the right vitamins, minerals and nutrients especially if you're injured. Your body's under extra stress trying to heal so making sure you get a well-balanced nutritious diet will help in the healing process. Getting the right vitamins and minerals in your body is key to recovering fast no matter what your injury is. Next is ice. Ice is great for reducing the swelling. It's the first thing athletes and experienced fighters go do immediately after suffering an injury. But recently there's been more research done around ice therapy and they're showing that ice therapy in longer periods can actually harm the recovery so experts have advised short periods of five minutes at a time to help with the pain. I'm going to do a full video on showing you exactly how my husband Tony used to ice his hands after trying so many different methods that put extra time on his boxing career so subscribe and turn on your notifications so you don't miss that video. Next is compression and elevation. That's explained in another of my videos the RICE method you've probably heard of that before and stands for rest, ice, compression and elevation and I recommend all of these specifically in that order. The next tip is heat. Heat packs are great a couple of days or a week after the injury once the initial swelling has gone down but like I said applying the ice to reduce the pain and then you want to start increasing the blood flow and loosening up that area to get that healthy blood circulation going. If you have access to a sauna use it. The National Institute of Health performed quite a large study involving athletes from a college. The subjects all had experienced some sort of ligament tears and tendinitis or strains and all of the athletes participated in a wide variety of sports and they wanted to get back into training and get healthy as fast as they could and the study that was published at the end of that used the spectrum of light to heal cognitive tissue injuries to speed up recovery to get them to return to play faster. Also using topical creams like tiger ointment analgesics like lidocaine non-steroidals like diclofenac they can be prescribed by your physician and these target specific areas of pain like your elbows your shoulders they really sink into that area and treat the injury close to the surface. The next tip is massage it's one of those things that you may take for granted now depending on your injury but you really shouldn't take it for granted it actually is so underrated it's proven to prevent muscle damage and joint injuries by smoothing out those adhesions which if you do it regularly it increases the circulation and those overused muscles and sore areas get increased circulation and it actually prevents the injuries in the first place so please yeah taking care of your body by having regular massages like deep tissue massages it's so important Now before I tell you what you need to do to prevent most injuries I want to ask you which has been your worst injury and how did you treat it? Let me know in the comments down below and don't forget to subscribe Okay so what can you do to prevent most injuries? Remember what I said at the start about boxing being a full body workout? Well people forget to warm up and cool down they forget all the time to warm up their full body they just do a few little kicks and like stretch their arms a thorough warm-up warming up all of the muscles you have to do it you can't miss it out just doing like a little jog or like a few shoulder rolls it's not going to cut it you've got to spend a good 10 to 15 minutes on this warm-up and you'll notice that your training sessions are going to improve also and as well as preventing injuries you'll also notice that your training sessions are going to improve so much by warming up If you want to get a better night's sleep which will also help you recover from your injuries click here and watch this video for great tips on how to get the best night's sleep ever