The Biggest Injury Recovery Mistake You're Making

By Grant Frost · Physiotherapist • Last clinically reviewed: 10 March 2026

Your Wellness Nerd

Hands up if you automatically reach for an ice pack after an injury. Well, in today's video, I want to talk to you about why you should reconsider doing that. Despite the fact that ice has been a staple of acute injury management for decades, as a health and medical industry, we are slowly coming around to the idea that ice isn't speeding up the recovery process. It may actually be slowing it down.

So, let's talk about why we ice, its effect on the healing process, and why ice may not be the thing that you should turn to to expedite your recovery after an injury.

1. Why We Started Icing Injuries

And that idea may sound a little bit controversial or even confusing if we've been telling you for decades that you need to ice an injury straight away. Once we take a small step back and consider what actually happens when you ice tissue and then overlay that onto what needs to happen for your body to heal effectively, those two things don't line up.

We'll get into the details in a second. It's really important to understand how we got here. The use of ice in acute injury management really took off in the late 1970s thanks to a sports medicine doctor by the name of Dr. Gabe Mirkin. The RICE protocol, which stands for rest, ice, compression, and elevation, was introduced to combat the three main things we deal with in any acute injury: pain, swelling, and inflammation.

The idea was that by icing these tissues, we can lower pain, prevent or limit inflammation, and reduce swelling. That by limiting pain, swelling, and inflammation, we can stop that from getting in the way of healing, allow you to get back on your feet faster. Intuitively, that makes sense. So much so that every elite sporting organization, recreational athletes, and every first aid course, the use of the RICE protocol - but more specifically, ice - has become one of the most well-recognized acute injury management processes.

2. Pain, Swelling and Inflammation Explained

In order to understand what we may have been missing for so long, we ultimately need to consider what's normal. For example, if you hurt yourself, your body knows exactly what it needs to do to expedite that healing process to get you back on your feet as quickly as possible. And while the use of an ice pack makes sense, in a weird way, your body shouldn't need something external to happen to you in order to do something that is an internal process. That's not to say we can't speed it up, but we need to make sure that we're actually speeding it up.

From a pain perspective, we know that pain can be a consequence of tissue damage. But what's always interesting to talk about in regards to pain is that your perception of pain isn't necessarily just based on damage alone. There are plenty of people out there who have horrible life-altering pain experiences that genuinely have nothing to show for it. All pain represents is your brain and nervous system's perception of threat. So obviously if you injure or damage something that is threatening, that may generate pain. But it's important to understand that your pain experience isn't based on damage alone. It's based on how your nervous system inherently feels about that situation.

3. What Ice Actually Does to the Healing Process

When using ice, ice is a very effective pain reliever. Research is relatively clear that putting ice on injured tissue can help you with your pain experience. But as we'll get to as we talk about inflammation and swelling, we may need to ultimately weigh up the pros and cons of icing something for pain relief versus icing something to speed up that healing process.

Most people understand that when you put ice on tissue, it tends to decrease blood flow to that area. The blood vessels and your vascular system almost close off a little bit to decrease the amount of blood that goes to that area. And because of that idea, we used to think that that's fantastic in preventing inflammation and preventing swelling. And we've worked off this idea that less of that means that you can recover faster.

But what gets lost in this idea is that inflammation and swelling are both normal. They are just a part of the process that your body needs to go through to start at the injured stage and then come out at the fully healed stage at the end.

What happens when you injure yourself is that your blood flow increases to that area. Why? Because it needs to. Your body has this amazing ingrained inherent ability to send the cleanup crew to the area to break down injured tissue to start rebuilding things straight away. And if we do decrease the ability for blood to get to that area, we also decrease the ability for it to heal effectively.

What we're starting to ask ourselves is why are we trying to interfere with that? Why are we trying to stop that with something like ice that is good at decreasing blood flow? It may be good at dampening that inflammatory process, but we don't want to if we want to get through this as quickly as possible because ultimately what happens is as soon as you take the ice pack off an injured area, once that tissue reheats, that whole process just kicks back into gear again. And that's where this idea of using ice is similar to putting a pause on the recovery process because it literally and physically may actually be doing that thing.

From a swelling perspective, it's important to reassure you that swelling is neither good nor bad. Too much can absolutely be detrimental. But swelling and congestion is just a byproduct of that inflammatory cycle, the healing cycle. So our goal shouldn't be to stop it or prevent it. It should be trying to work on ways to get rid of it as quickly as it accumulates.

4. What to Do Instead of Ice

So, the best advice I can give you about whether you should be icing an acute injury or not is that if your pain is wildly out of control and you don't have access to pain medication, an ice pack may be a very valid short-term thing that you can try in an attempt to get that acute pain under control as best as possible, knowing full well that as soon as you feel you can stop icing it, it will have a more positive impact on how quickly you recover over time. But having said that, if you have access to pain relief and it's safe for you to take it, that may be a better option than using an ice pack.

In the spirit of hopefully giving you confidence that you can put the ice pack away for good, I'd now like to talk about a few really simple things that you could consider instead that isn't trying to interfere with what the body's already trying to do, but does try and support and expedite what it's already doing, but better.

When trying to figure out what to do instead of ice for acute injuries, we ultimately need to revert back to what the body's looking for when it's healing. So if we again still focus on those three main things of pain, swelling, and inflammation, fortunately, there's some very simple things that you can do to help optimize your body's ability to get through those processes as quickly as possible.

5. The Role of Movement in Recovery

The first is movement. And again, that may sound counterintuitive if you've just hurt yourself or broken a bone - that movement is the thing you want to focus on when we've told you for decades that resting is the most important thing. But your body as a machine is wired for movement. A lot of the processes that go into healing injured tissue are optimized with movement.

For example, when we're looking at swelling, the only way that your body can remove that swelling or congestion is through a passive system called your lymphatic system. That lymphatic system or that waste removal system is driven by passive muscle contraction. Kind of like a tube of toothpaste. Muscles contract, contract, contract, and flush out that swelling or that congestion to your lymph nodes and then you excrete that waste.

So, if we're icing your tissue and telling you not to move, we're not tapping into your body's natural ability to pump the crap out of the system. And while what movement actually looks like may differ for each person based on your specific circumstances, as I always say, we want to go looking for what your safe, respectful, pain-free window of movement looks like and make sure that you work within that as much as you can at any given point throughout the day. Too little isn't good enough. Too much is certainly not good enough either.

There will be a sweet spot where you feel you can do just enough to keep the system going without overloading it or underloading it at the same time. That may mean gentle walking. It may mean gentle movements of the area. If that's out of the question, even just gentle tensing and relaxing the things above and below the injured area, if not the injured area itself, can again feed into your body's ability to flush out that waste.

If active movement isn't available to you, other things like gentle soft tissue massage, voodoo floss, those passive compression devices, you want to actively or passively pump out that congestion to get it out of that area so it doesn't accumulate.

6. Pain Relief and Breathing Techniques

And while pain-free, respectful active motion can help with pain and swelling, we still want to make sure that you are doing things to help with your pain if you need it. As I mentioned, pain relief can be very advantageous if used correctly. But the type of pain relief that you use may also have a positive or a negative influence on how quickly you recover at the end of the day.

Your straight pain relievers, not your anti-inflammatories, can be okay at dulling that pain signal. But just know that pain is normal. Pain gives us boundaries so we can understand what that pain-free respectful movement window is. So, if you can get by without pain relief, you'll have a much better understanding of what you can do to expedite this process. Just know that if you reach for an anti-inflammatory rather than just a straight pain reliever, you may be negatively influencing that inflammatory cycle. Again, we don't want to short circuit or stop inflammation. We want things to get inflamed. We just want to get your body to go through that process as quickly as possible and get rid of the waste at the same time.

So use pain relief if or as needed. The type of pain relief you use matters, but ultimately we don't have to make you a hero. We just want to respect what your body is telling us.

And following on from this, if you find that pain medication isn't for you, obviously we don't want anti-inflammatories if we can avoid it. We can still influence the severity and the intensity of your pain through something as simple as deep breathing or other things that downregulate that heightened spiked nervous system by focusing on your breathing.

It can be something as simple as a slow controlled deep breath in with a pause at the top, a relaxed breath out with a pause at the bottom. By downregulating an acutely heightened nervous system, we can decrease how painful something is and how long it's painful for. We're not masking the pain. We're not switching it off. We're downregulating the system back to a more normal baseline so that it's not feeling as threatened.

The other positive side effect of trying to downregulate that heightened nervous system is that the parasympathetic nervous system, which is your down regulatory system, aligns itself really well with rest and recovery. So, if you're heightened because you're panicked and in pain and you're freaking out, it's harder for your body to dump into that healing phase as effectively if it's still feeling unsafe and on edge.

Final Thoughts: Respect the Body's Process

As I've mentioned a few times in this video, we don't want to think that we know better than the body. It knows exactly what it's trying to do. And it will always be trying to do that thing, whether we heat it up, cool it down, give it something, take something away from it. And if any of those things aren't respecting what it's trying to do and ultimately try and optimize and expedite how quickly it does those things, then we will forever be getting in the way of that process and ultimately slowing things down.

If the first instinct is ultimately reaching for an ice pack to help improve an acute injury, we are doing ourselves a disservice. We need to respect pain and we need to find ways that get you out of pain that hopefully don't require the use of an ice pack so that it doesn't add time onto your recovery at the end of the day.

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Living With Persistent Pain?

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