R.I.C.E. Up Your Strategy: Refreshing Ideas for Better Results

When you get injured, what protocol springs to mind? Probably R.I.C.E.

It is what everyone has been doing since Dr Gabe Mirkin published “Sports Medicine Book” in 1978.

It makes sense. When you get hurt you should do the R – Rest. Then for the pain you I – Ice. To get rid of the swelling you add C – Compression. Then to finish you E – Evelate.

A tried and tested approach to help you heal from injury, but it wasn’t as ways like this?

In the past, in the olden days before R.I.C.E, was the strange and crazy world of adding heat pads to your sore body.

Things changed when we started to be afraid of inflammation and so the R.I.C.E days are here for ever and ever and there is no more learning needing to happen.

Or maybe the R.I.C.E method only works from a certain point of view, potentially wrong.

If It Ain’t Broke

You can still improve it.

And luckily someone did. In 2013, Gary Heinl published his book “Iced! The Illusionary Treatment Option” where he challenged the idea that R.I.C.E speeds up recovery from injury and showed that it might slow it down.

The idea of R.I.C.E and the desire to help people heal is a noble pursuit but it was trying to maximise the appearance of injury, rather than heal the injury itself.

When people used to heat sore areas it would increase the blood flow to an area and sometimes increase inflammation in an already sore or sensitive area.

This inflammation looked bad. It looks like what happens immediately after you injure yourself so inflammation equalled bad.

If you get inflammation following an injury then the opposite of that is removing the inflammation.

The hunt to remove inflammation became the goal. You can understand the logic. If something is bad the opposite must be good.

So R.I.C.E came along and ticked all of those boxes.

Old Becomes New Again

Now we know that inflammation is part of the natural healing process and isn’t something to be afraid of.

We don’t want it to hang around too long though. Instead of rest, the recommendation is to move. If you are in terrible pain, obviously don’t go for a run on it, but moving it any way you can will increase the lymphatic drainage.

Again, another natural healing pathway.

Ice, compression, and elevation might not do too much for us either.

Ongoing Upgrading

All of the healing methodologies made sense and were trying to help people recovering from injury.

They just happened to be the best at the time given what we knew and understood.

They also, all were updated with better evidence and understanding.

And since you probably didn’t know that R.I.C.E was discredited you can see that once ideas get ingrained it can be very hard to remove them.

As part of your team’s training and upskilling, you should challenge the assumptions you think are correct.

There is nothing wrong with changing your mind when you get new information. Don’t hold on to old ideas because you have believed them for so long that you will feel like you have been foolish all of those years if you admit you have been wrong.

You were doing the best you could with the information you had available and now with new information, you can make better decisions.

And you keep doing that forever.