Full Recovery Requires
Several Shifts In Thinking

Our attitudes, beliefs and habitual associations can play an important role in recovering from any Repetitive Strain Injury. If you can harness the power of these beliefs, attitudes and habits, then you can exponentially increase the success rate of your recovery program. Here are the most important factors to consider:

1. If you believe you will have a successful recovery, then you probably will.

An attitude of success opens your mind to considering all possibilities, seeing from a new perspective, accepting that success is inevitable. While it may feel like the search for information that works may go on for a long time, an attitude of eventual success will keep you open to all possibilities and help you receive new information with a clear and open mind.

2. You must be willing to try new things.

Face it. If you were already using your body in the best possible way, you would not have gotten injured, or the recovery programs you have tried up until now would have already been successful.

If this is the case for you, then success requires that you change your thinking about how you will recover. You must be willing to try new things, experiment with new techniques, dare to do things differently than you have ever done before.

Recovering from a repetitive strain injury is highly individual. Each person is unique and how their injury developed and what tissue it affects is different for each person. Any program you try will probably have very effective components to it, but no program will be exactly right for everyone.

So, what do you do? Be willing to think outside the box. If you are trying a stretch, try varying the stretch slightly. Hold the stretch a little longer. Try pulling through a slightly different direction. Add a little movement to the stretch. Pay attention to the sensations you feel and the result you get. Observe the after effects. Has this new variation worked better for you? If so, add it to your repertoire!

3. Realize that you are dealing with damaged tissue.

At the beginning of a recovery program, your tissue is at its most injured. Nerves are the most stuck and irritated, adhesions are at their strongest. Muscle fatigue feels the greatest.

Acknowledge that since your tissue is damaged, you will have to treat this tissue more gently than if it were functioning normally. After all, if you had a severely sprained ankle, you would never ask yourself to jump rope, would you? Of course not!

The same is true with repetitive strain injuries. Be gentle with your body during this time of recovery. As more and more of your body returns to its former state of wellness, you will be able to safely tolerate more and more strenuous stretches and other activities. Within a short period of time, you might even be able to return to some of the sports and other physical activities you enjoyed before being injured.

4. Think differently about stretches.

Most people are introduced to stretches as part of a conditioning program. In that context, stretching is done by following a set of stretches, each repeated a certain amount of times, in a sort of stretching “regimen”.

I want to encourage you to think differently about stretches when you are using them as tools for recovery. I prefer to think of stretches as “handles” with which you can “grab” tissue and pull it along a particular line. In other words, a stretch is a tool you use to pull the injured tissue in a certain direction.

In recovery, stretches should not be done in “sets” with a certain number of “reps”. They are tools that are used to control the line of pull, the speed of release, the order of release throughout the body.

I follow this principle in all of my self care programs. Even if the program is designed to help eliminate forearm pain, the first stretches found in the program work to release the upper body. There is virtually no work done on the forearms in the beginning. Why? Because the component of the body which is injured is the fascia. Read more about Fascia at:

http://www.selfcare4rsi.com/fascia.html

Because fascia is one big continuous and connected bunch of tissue, it is important to create some “slack” in neighboring areas before approaching the most injured area. This makes it so much easier for the body to release in the affected area, i.e., the forearms.

In many cases, the upper body stretches are all that is needed to get complete recovery in the forearms. In other cases, more direct stretching of the forearms is eventually needed as well. It all depends on how your body developed your injury in the first place.

So, begin seeing your stretches as tools to help you access the parts of your body that are most symptomatic, where the most damage has been done. Use the stretches as a means to assess how sensitive the tissue is, where the exact location of adhesions are, what it takes to get the adhesions to let go, and to assess when the adhesions are completely gone.

Employing all these changes in thinking about your injury, how it formed, and the techniques you will use to recover will greatly enhance your ability to fully recover from whatever repetitive strain injury you have. Realize that you can successfully recover, remember that the tissue you are dealing with is damaged and deserves your careful attention, and being willing to try new things as you use your stretches as tools to access tight, restricted, and adhered tissue will help you recover faster and more effectively than you ever imagined possible. Carry on!