What Medicine Can Teach Sport
In one of my corporate roles, I spent a lot of time observing surgery. Most of those surgeries were in the abdomen, dealing with disease in organs. I learned that managing the disease state of the organ was relatively simple. I don’t claim to be a doctor or a surgeon; I mean that the mechanical actions of removing diseased tissue from an organ, like a partial kidney surgery or removing an inflamed gallbladder were fairly straightforward.
What took considerably longer in many surgeries was clearing out stringy attachments that bound all the organs up. Those stringy attachments are called adhesions. They represent your body trying to isolate sick things from healthy things by adhering them so they don’t move. The adhesions also represent compensation for prior damage, essentially scar tissue. And they can form a dense web that you can’t see, can’t feel, and can’t control. Your body just changes to manage the situation.
Injuries work like this, too. Every injury you’ve ever sustained lives with you today. Those old injuries changed you.
How Your Body Handles Injuries
If you frayed a few fibers in your quad with a major cramp triggered by being under-fueled, then played through it, your quad muscles reshaped themselves to distribute the workload. That reshaping affected blood flow. It affected scarring. And it affected how your tissue layers slide against each other (or don’t).
If you blew up your Achilles, as I did, then kept training around the stiffness, your heel bone and calf muscle worked overtime to permit you to move. But the combination of scarring and strain in your Achilles produced its own adhesions. The tendon and its capsule slide just a little worse; the blood supply to its fibers, already limited, becomes occluded.
The Evidence Of Injury Is Invisible
I had body fat scan on a DEXA machine done a few years ago. It showed a rough look at my bones and the distribution of muscle and fat around them. In the mild bone scan, I could see one tibia slightly misshapen and a moderate rotation of my pelvis. Both of those directly relate to an injury I picked up in a particularly nasty high school football season that was followed by a motorcycle wreck…back in 2007. Nearly 13 years later, those injuries live with me.
I got ultrasound on both Achilles a few months ago. My imaging revealed virtually no regular blood flow around those tissues, yet a hint of blood pooling in the one that hurts worse after I train. (I had trained lightly about 3 days prior.) So I get persistent inflammation as my body fights to get nutrients to my tendons. After 6+ years of (admittedly inconsistent) care, those injuries live with me.
And the fact that those injuries not only live with me but have changed me is exactly why I have to “turn pro”. During an interview on the PT Rebels Podcast, I described how Masters athletes need to behave like professional athletes. Adults in sport need to attend to their sleep, to their soft-tissue care, and to their nutrition to whatever extreme finances and circumstances allow.
[Listen to the episode on Apple or Spotify]
Masters and Professional Athletes Need The Same Things
Professional athletes and elite collegiates have full-time care teams around them. They need every bit of support available to keep high-performance bodies running optimally. They need providers for every physical, mental, and emotional need so they can devote all their attention to executing in training and delivering on competition. Yet even with all that support and narrow attention, much of success at the elite level is surviving and showing up again and again.
Masters athletes are exactly the same, but for one key thing: we need every bit of support available to keep our past injuries from becoming fresh injuries. In order to survive and show up again and again, Masters athletes need physical therapy, massage, recovery baths, coaching, and emotional therapy. We’re often wrestling with more factors, juggling more balls, and navigating more obstacles to get on the field…then on top of it, we have a longer history in sport and a longer list of injury-related changes to go with it.
My Body Has Changed Me For The Better
At 34, I’m not the person I was at 17. I certainly hope I am more mature, more balanced, and more gracious, but as an athlete, I also just have a completely different body. In preparing this body to compete, I need to remember that the execution in training and performance in competition are relatively straightforward.
What takes considerably more effort is managing my adhesions – both the social and emotional and professional constraints that limit my time to recover and the actual physical stringy attachments created by every injury I’ve ever had. Each of those injuries lives with me. Each of those injuries has changed me.
My job isn’t to fight them. They emerged to protect me from myself. My job is to recognize they exist, to acknowledge the role they played in keeping me moving, and to act like a professional in managing the adhesions that exist and minimizing the formation of new ones.
Critically, this shift in perspective is how my history of injuries has really changed me. If you’re an adult in sport, you need to make that shift today, tomorrow, and every future day you plan to stay on the field. I’m here to walk with you when you are ready for support.