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We often suffer from injuries during our sports endeavours, and one of the worst aftershocks to most injuries is the swelling that occurs, and also the on-going pain. Without effective treatment, pain and swelling can prolong rehabilitation, keeping you out of the game for longer than you want to be. Cold therapy is now one of the most widely used and effective treatments to increase rehabilitation and reduce swelling and pain. When choosing cold therapy as a method of treatment, it's important to understand how cold therapy works, and how it aids our bodies in speeding up rehabilitation.
There are many reasons why cold therapy is such a great treatment method for sports injuries. The all too familiar swelling which occurs with many sports injuries is decreased by using cold therapy. Cold therapy lowers the fluids which surround the injury and decreases the flow of the chemicals in the body that cause pain and further swelling. Cold therapy reduces pain levels, and that numb feeling you get from cold therapy is due to a reduction in your nerve endings ability to transmit and receive impulses. By applying cold therapy to our muscles, it decreases the risk of muscle spasms by lowering muscular contraction ability. Muscle spasms can cause unwanted pain and are preventable using cold therapy, which can lower the risk of further injury and leave you feeling much more comfortable.
Cold therapy increases the rate of rehabilitation. By applying cold therapy, the area of the body which is receiving the treatment has it's metabolism lowered. A lower metabolism lowers the rate and risk of cell death. This ups the speed of your return to action, as fewer repairs are needed to your body if fewer cells die and need to be replaced. Using cold therapy to reduce pain, you are less likely to move the affected area around to try and find comfortable positions and this allows your body's natural healing process to work it's course faster. We already know that muscle spasms can increase further injury, applying cold therapy lowers the risk of a spasm, increasing the recuperation period. We know that applying cold therapy reduces swelling, and reducing swelling also helps to decrease the amount of time you spend in rehabilitation after your injury.
There are many different products available for applying cold therapy, and the differences are generally for different areas of the body that cold therapy needs to be applied to. Cold therapy is used at a professional level to treat sports injuries and should be considered as a low cost and easily pepped solution to reducing pain, swelling and most importantly, rehabilitation time.
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