Why Sports Medicine 3.0 Is The Key To Fixing Chronic Injuries
People walk into ASR on a weakly basis, telling us that they have “weak, broken back” or “shitty knees” or are “broken from years of playing sports” because they always get hurt during KB swings, squats, swinging a golf club, or going skiing.
The reality, most of the time, is that these painful incidences are the endpoint of a long-downward trend line of lifestyle habits that add up to an injury.
When we do a new client eval, we always ask about the following lifestyle factors (that seem unrelated to physical activity) to get an idea of where someone’s general health trend line was heading before the incident.
This week, I wanted to share these areas and explain why we ask about them.
- Work and Life Stress: Mental stress affects your physical body just as much as physical stress. Often, we can time an injury around increased mental stress.
- Sleep: Sleep is the MOST IMPORTANT THING YOU CAN DO FOR RECOVERY. People who don’t get enough sleep (more than 7 hours per night) get hurt more often because they never completely heal from little tweaks, and over time, they become a cumulative injury. People who sleep less also heal more slowly.
- Training Balance: The data is pretty straightforward: two weekly strength workouts plus 75-150 minutes of vigorous aerobic exercises (heart rate zone 3-5) or 150-300 minutes of moderate-intensity (HR zone 2) is ideal for physical health. We see people get hurt when this balance is off.
- Overreaching In Training: You can’t redline it every day and every session. History is littered with millions of stories of both athletes and coaches (running coach Arthur Lydiard is a very famous example) who have had temporary success before massive long-term failures from doing high-intensity and high volume.
- Repetitive Motions In Life: The “Law of Repetitive Motion” (expressed as I=NF/AR in science) states that tissue stress injury likelihood increases with the number (N) and force (F) of repetition while decreasing with a lower amplitude (A) of motion and high rest interval (R) between repetitions. Increasing repetitions and force (N and F) without adequate rest (R) and the right amplitude (A) increases the risk of injury. Suppose we hear on an intake that a client is sitting for long periods. In that case, we know that it is a high force, low amplitude movement and that the tissues around their SI joint are going to have a high likelihood of injury because of the repetitive motion of sitting over stresses those tissues.
- Nutrition: We are living beings who generate new fleshy structures from nutrients derived from eating other living matter we put in our mouths. When people eat processed bullshit (sugar, refined oils, bread, snacks, chips), they get enough (often excessive) calories but not enough living nutrients, and so they don’t have enough of the matter required to regenerate our flesh, so they don’t heal from little tweaks, and over time they add up into a big giant problem.
By doing this, we can often find the root cause of chronic issues that have plagued someone for years and fix them forever.
In his legendary book, Outlive, Dr. Peter Attia calls this kind of healthcare “Medicine 3.0.” In this type of healthcare, we aren’t just trying to patch holes in a leak levy when it is actually about to break from being overfilled; we are solving the actual overfilling problem and preventing a future major trauma that leads to a significant intervention, like surgery.
So, if you are that human who is always suffering from chronic low back tweaks from lifting or knee pain when you run, etc., you have to see us experience the difference that being a sports medicine 3.0 practice makes.
Our 3-Step Process For Success
- Treat the injury to help it heal faster.
- Find the root cause of the issue and fix it.
- Bulletproof your body against future injuries with the right exercises.
Fix your chronic injuries by booking an appointment here.
