Can simply thinking about healing make your running injury heal faster? Well, that is what we’re talking about today on the Doc On The Run Podcast.
Your brain is very powerful at taking information that you give it as input and doing something with it whether you want to control that output or not. You don’t believe me? Okay let’s try a little exercise. I want you to close your eyes. Don’t do this if you are driving but if you are sitting at home or you are sitting someplace safe, I want you to close your eyes. Now that your eyes are closed, do not picture a purple elephant. Okay, did you picture a purple elephant? Well, why is that? I just told you do not picture a purple elephant.
But the thing is that whenever you give your brain these cues your brain will do what it does even if you want to stop it and your unconscious mind is the majority of your brain power and it is at work and it is not just controlling things that you want to happen but it’s controlling things that you don’t want and if you focus on negativity, if you focus on your injury getting worse, you will probably get worse.
I think it was Henry Ford who actually said whether you think you can or you think you can’t you are probably right and what you think about when you have an injury really does matter. If you think you can get better, you probably will and if you think you’ll never get better, you probably won’t.
So, the question is can you take this aspect of your brain and controlling your subconscious mind and use it to your advantage when you are trying to heal and get back to running? Well, the short answer is yes you can believe it or not and this is not new, this is not my idea, this is a thing called neuroplasticity.
Neuroplasticity all that really means is plastic which means to be able to mold or change and neuro has to do with nerves in your nervous system. Neuroplasticity is the brain’s remarkable ability to actually reorganize and adapt these neural connections by forming new connections between nerves and that can play a vital role in all aspects of your overall health not just healing but when you have a running injury, and you are trying to heal.
It could be healing anything. It could be healing a stress fracture, it could be healing an Achilles tendon injury, it could be healing a split in the perineal tendon or a tiny little perforation in the plantar plate. But when you have any kind of injury or illness, this idea of recruiting your brain and your subconscious mind to get it to heal faster can be really helpful. If you don’t believe me, I don’t care, go listen to something else but this is a thing is what it does is and I’m going to try to explain in the simplest way.
The neuroplasticity, what it really does is it enables your brain to actually adjust its pathways in a way that really not just forms neural connections, but it reinforces the strength of those connections, and it can actually result in replacing lost functions. Like for example if somebody has brain surgery, they remove a part of their brain that controls their right arm, the movement of their right arm, they may get movement back but only if a different part of the brain takes over that activity. That is a form of neuroplasticity and if you do exercises like visualization exercises that show changes in blood flow, changes in osteoclastic and osteoblastic activity that do remodel bone tenocytic activity that lays down collagen in a tendon or ligament, that those things can alter the course of healing.
There are research studies that show this, I’m going to do some other episodes that talk about specific studies that look at these things and it’s not just about getting nerves to talk to each other but those things coordinate motor functions in terms of changing the amount of blood flow in an area, recruiting cells to an area and getting tissue to start to heal a lot faster. So, this is a very powerful tool. It’s inexpensive, it’s free where you can do visualization exercise.
My first exposure to visualization I think I was in either second or third grade and we had wrestling as one of the activities we could sign up for and I was in wrestling. My dad had been a wrestler in high school, we were talking about the specific moves that he was showing me and he was telling me that when he was a kid, which was a long time ago, when he was a kid in the 1950s, what he would do is that every night when he was going to sleep he would actually visualize himself going through these particular moves for takedowns and certain holds over and over in his brain. And he said that when you do that, it increases your body’s ability to execute those maneuvers because it reinforces your brain’s connections.
What he was really talking about was neuroplasticity before there was a term for neuroplasticity or maybe that term did exist, and he didn’t think that I as a second or third grader could understand it. But it does do the same thing when you are talking about healing your cells.
There is some recent research that is highlighted these, the profound impact of this visualization exercise on neuroplasticity and physiologic healing processes, this is not just talking about being better coordinated to do moves and wrestling, it’s about the actual physiologic healing process.
There was a study published by Newberg and Alavia in 2020 that demonstrated that engaging in mental imagery practices the exact same thing I was just describing that my dad told me about when I was in elementary school, that if you are engaging in mental imagery practices otherwise known as visualization where you picture something happening in your mind, it not only facilitated neuroplastic changes in brain structure but it also enhanced the body’s ability to repair tissue.
Participants in this study who practice visualization techniques, they showed increased connectivity and brain regions associated with emotion regulation and stress response leading to lower cortisol levels, that is a hormone that is linked to stress, and it can delay your healing. This research just shows how the potential mental imagery as a therapeutic tool can really do something not just for psychological well-being but for physical recovery.
Again, we’re going to have some other episodes here where I talk about the specific things the way that this works with bone healing, with tendon healing, with ligament healing, all of that. But it does work and there was a recent episode I did where I had said that one of the things I was going to do if I was going to try to heal an injury myself and get back to running in less than 30 days, one of the things I would do every single morning is a visualization exercise where I was trying to visualize my body’s cells repairing that tissue remodeling it making it stronger and getting it to improve and strengthen every single day. And so, we’re going to talk in some other episodes about the research that backs up this idea, so you won’t believe it’s all hocus pocus because it’s not hocus pocus.
If you want to understand the other things you can do as an injured runner to get back the steps you can take the action steps that you can apply to your own recovery so you can get back to training faster, I put it together for you and go to www.docontherun.com/12steps and you can get that training there for free. So, come check out the 12 steps presentation and I’ll see you there.
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