Ice vs Heat: Which is Better for Your Injury?

Hello everyone and happy Sunday!

Last week, I talked about recovery, and how important it is to keep our bodies working. One of the techniques I mentioned is therapeutic icing and heating. Now, here is a question I get ALL THE TIME from students and parents: Should I use ice or heat for an injury? The answer to that is that it depends! Basically, ice is for fresh injuries and heat is for stiff, aching muscles. Seems simple, but there are a lot of details that go into it. Let’s look at some!

Icing:

Ice is for injuries. You use it to calm down damaged tissues that are inflamed, red, hot, and swollen. When you get an injury, swelling is normal and healthy, but it also happens to be pretty painful and stubborn. Using ice is a drugless way of dulling the pain and taking the swelling down a bit. 

Heating:

Heat is for muscles, chronic pain, and stress. You use it to take the edge off symptoms like muscle aching and stiffness. Heat is also helpful for soothing chronic pain, especially back pain!

Did you know that if you use either ice or heat for the wrong thing, you can actually make it worse?! If you have a fresh injury, and decide to use heat, it will make the swelling larger and make it more painful than it originally would’ve been. On the contrast, if you ice muscle pain, you can actually make yourself more stiff, and then prone to other injuries. This is the case for most neck and back pain: people often try to ice these, when the answer should be to use heat to loosen everything up.

Icing and heating are great home remedies, because they are fast, easy, and cheap! Again, like I mentioned last week, the best person to diagnose an injury is a doctor, so don’t forget to seek professional, medical help whenever necessary. 

Don’t forget to breathe and drink water!

Catch you next week!

Mar