How To Accelerate Recovery And Rehabilitation

Is your recovery from an injury or surgery too slow?  Have you wondered how some people can bounce back from an injury or even surgery quickly?  That’s because they’re feeding their bodies what it needs to repair, rebuild and regenerate itself.

To accelerate healing, your best bets are consuming relatively large quantities of protein.  The easiest building blocks for our bodies to turn into human cells are protein from animal sources.  Things like fish, meat and eggs.  A good rule of thumb is to get at least 50 grams of protein into your body by noon (from real food).  50 grams of protein is roughly 228 grams of meat (or 7 – 8 eggs depending on their size.)

Another really good source of a muscle, bone, tendon, cartilage and skin tissue rebuilder is gelatin.  Bone broth is an excellent way to consume gelatin because it comes with a host of other beneficial nutrients.  Here are recipes for Chicken Broth, Beef Broth and Fish Broth.  For a supplement form of gelatin, I would recommend the products from the Great Lakes Gelatin Company.

Vegetable broths are full of organ healing minerals as well.

Both types of broths also aid in improving digestion, which is a must for us to be able to absorb the nutrients from what we eat.  There’d be no point in eating high quality food without being able to synthesize and utilize the nutrients in them.  A very good way to ensure proper digestion is through eating fermented foods (sauerkraut, beet kvass, kefir, yogurt – non flavoured is the key, since it has the least additives).  Taking high quality probiotics will also heal your gut flora, protecting you from microbes and helping you absorb nutrients from what you eat.  The brands I would take myself are Dr. Ron’s Friendly Flora, Bio-Kult and Innate Response’s probiotics.

(I have no financial interest in any of the brands I recommend.  They’re what my research showed to be of highest quality, which is why I use them with my clients and for myself.)

When you’re looking to repair (or even build) a house, you want the best bricks and other high quality building materials.  The same goes for your body.  Its cells are made up of what goes into your mouth.  The higher the quality and the better the digestion, the more of the building blocks can be used to create a solid structure, be it the connective tissue in the knees, a bicep tendon or the next cells in our eye balls.

A few other tips to speed up recovery.

1) Get a near infrared “heat lamp” and point it to the injured area for about 5 minutes at a time to improve circulation and repair

2) Avoid icing

3) Drink lots of fluids (broth would be great as well as a mix of lemon/honey/sea salt/apple cider vinegar and water)

4) If it’s a joint injury, strengthen the muscles that support and stabilize the joint

5) Increase your high quality fish oil or cod liver oil intake

6) Meditate or perform energy cultivating movements like Tai Chi and Qi Gong

7) Go to sleep early (by 10:00pm) to further speed up recovery since your physical repair happens between 10:00pm and 2:00am each night.  The later you go to sleep the less time your body has to repair itself.

What have you done that worked well to speed up recovering from injuries or surgery?