With Coach Alexa, Online Running Coach and in-person coaching in South Oxfordshire
Why Tissue Healing Times Matter
I wanted to give a quick recap today about tissue healing times. This is mostly for us runners perhaps with injuries through overtraining or through having a bit of a crash in a fall somewhere.
Just to give us a bit of an idea that different tissue types heal and recover in fact on different timescales.
How Muscles Heal
The quickest of the bunch is the muscles. The muscles shout the loudest normally when they’re hurt because they’ve got a fantastic nerve supply, but they also heal pretty quickly because they’ve got a fantastic blood supply. So they get all of the nutrients they need to heal up really quickly.
It’s also in our body’s interest to heal our muscles ’cause they help us move. We do not want to be immobile for too long, going back a few hundred years where that would have meant not being able to work or get food or whatever it might be.
With micro damage to muscle fibres like you get from a hard session in the gym, you will know from personal experience that it takes days to be fully recovered. For small muscle tears and larger muscle tears it obviously takes longer because there’s more repairing to do. But generally we are talking weeks even. Even for that kind of thing, if you’ve got the proper kind of rehab team involved, they will heal themselves up pretty quickly.
How Bones Heal
Bones are probably the next quickest again, because there’s skin in the game for our body to heal those quickly so we can be back up and running literally in a survival type situation. They have a good blood supply still, similar to muscles.
Bones heal in a slightly different way. They also need quite a lot of nutrients, particularly things like calcium, to be able to heal up.
The tissue times do vary depending on the type of bone you’ve broken, where it is in the body, whether it’s one of the big load bearing bones like your tibia or your femur, your shin bone or your thighbone, and also how old you are, as is the case with all of these things. But particularly with bones, particularly if you are female, that healing time does get noticeably longer as we get older.
Generally we are talking from six weeks into a number of months for full bone healing time, particularly if you’re talking one of the big load bearing bones in the legs. That will take a little bit longer.
Tendons and Ligaments – The Slow Healers
Further down the list we get things like tendons and ligaments. These are sometimes the trickier ones to rehab. They do not have a particularly good blood supply at all. They tend to have much longer tissue healing times.
This is where it’s even more important to get a physio or somebody like that involved just to make sure that you’re doing the right things because tendon and ligament reloading is a little bit of a tricky game to play. You want to make sure you’re doing the right things and getting the most out of that rehab because it will take months potentially for full healing, depending on what you’ve done and how it happened.
What About Cartilage?
When we’re talking about things like cartilage in our joints, people often have in their mind that it does not heal. It kind of does in a way. It responds to things, but it responds in an incredibly long timescale of years. So we do not tend to really notice it fixing itself in the same way as the other tissue types do.
