Ice Is for Dead People

This is a topic from Tom Bisio's book mentioned by The FAB in his previous post.

"Ice is very useful for preserving things in a static state. It slows or halts the decay of food and dead bodies but does not help damaged tissue repair itself. Ice does reduce the initial swelling and inflammation of a fresh injury, and it does reduce pain, but at a cost. Contracting local blood vessels and tissues by freezing them inhibits the restoration of normal circulation. The static blood and fluids congeal, contract, and harden with icing, making them harder or impossible to disperse later. It is not uncommon to see a sprained ankle that was iced still slightly swollen more than a year after the original injury."

Chinese Sports Medicine - it takes a bit to get your head around it. It provides alternate strategies to reduce swelling and inflammation while quickly restoring normal circulation - without the downsides of icing. There's a lot more to it besides the liniments, but I'm all for injuries that heal quicker and chronic issues which have gone away.

Of course, if I really wanted to minimize damage to my body I wouldn't show up on Tuesday nights. TNBBCers don't treat old guys with quite the same respect as equivalently aged scotch.