Chris' Corner: Tricks of the trade from your friendly neighboorhod Certified Athletic Trainer

It's a little late after our trip to Florida Tech but I wanted to post this week's edition while I had my educational topic fresh in my head. This week's trick of the trade: Why ice? Anyone remotely familiar with sports medicine knows that we who practice the profession love ice! Why this infatuation with those little lumps of cold? The reasons are many, but here are a few of the biggies. First, with any injury be it a ligament sprain, a contusion, whatever, there is going to be an inflammatory process associated with said injury. Application of ice to the injury site helps to control this inflammatory process. This, coupled with compression, means less accumulation of swelling in the area. Less swelling means less pain and less dysfunction in the days following the injury. Second, ice is an excellent analgesic. Cold slows down cellular activity, including that of specialized nerves (called nociceptors) that send pain messages to the brain. The less these nerves transmit their messages the less pain you feel! Along these same lines, ice slows down cellular metabolism. Cells require oxygen to function. At the site of injury local cells are in an oxygen deprived state (the reasons why are a whole other topic, but trust me it's true). You slow down cellular metabolism you decrease their need for oxygen. You decrease their need for oxygen and you decrease the amount of secondary injury due to hypoxic (oxygen deprived) cell death. Finally, and perhaps most important in terms of self-care for the lay person, you can almost never go wrong with ice! Barring a circulatory or neurological deficiency or an ice allergy (rare but it happens) application of ice is the safe bet! Even though it might "feel" better application of heat too early in the healing process will hinder the body's progress through this process. In other words.........when in doubt ice!

How about that, I even threw in some geeky medical terminology into this week's dose of geek knowledge. In all seriousness though, I hope my Athletic Trainer talk each week is useful, educational or at least interesting.

On the lighter side. This was the first week of conference play. It's nice to be playing only one match at a time. Just this week some of the walking wounded seemed to respond well to the reduced stress on their bodies. The injury report is down to one and knock on wood I expect it to be zero by the end of the coming week. That could not be more important when you play in our conference where you better have your top athletes available every match. One loss could be the difference between making the NCAA tournament or going home early.

As an Athletic Trainer I am not supposed to get too involved with wins and losses. My lane is the health and medical well being of the athletes in my charge. I'm not going to lie though gang, it's hard not to be a fan of this group. Quite simply, coaches and athletes alike, it's just a group of quality people! When you're around such people day in and day out you can't help but root for their success. And knowing that in your own small way you may have contributed to that success makes it that much sweeter.

Thanks for tuning in. See you next week at Chris' Corner.