Skateboarding Recovery – Icing, stretching and general body maintenance

We often complain about body pain or stiffness after a good skating session. Check these recovery actions that can help you reduce those aches and allow you to skate better the next day.

Cure those aches and pains

Static Stretching

By holding the position of the stretch for at least 30 second you relax the muscle, which brings your body back to balance and restores it to its relaxed pre-session state. It can also help you maintain your flexibility; by restoring any flexibility you might have lost during your session, along with reducing muscle spasms. Any kind of cool-down is good for gradually reducing your body’s fight or flight mechanisms.

Foam Rolling

Foam rolling is essentially a form of self-massage that allows you to apply deep pressure to certain points of the body to release tightness and muscular tension. Adding foam roller exercises into your recovery session can help you prevent muscle soreness tightness and stiffness.

Helping those standard skate injuries

Icing

Common injuries in skateboarding such as bruised shins and ankles from getting a slam from your board, ankle sprains, smacking your hip on the ground and general bruised limps, they are all cause inflammation.

Often people think that they should use ice only for the first 24hrs. Unless you’ve got an open wound, you can use ice for days after the injury in order to speed up the recovery. Since applying ice to an injury or inflamed spot has been shown to reduce pain (Reference: Dr. Mirkin). It is therefore acceptable to cool an injured part for short periods soon after the injury occurs. You could apply the ice for up to 10 minutes, remove it for 20 minutes, and repeat the 10 minute application once or twice.

Icing is primarily a pain-reliever, and not an actual treatment. That is, it doesn’t “fix” anything. Use it like you use ibuprofen. It may help to resolve chronic problems but it’s mostly intended to simply numb painfully inflamed or other hurting tissues.

The decreased blood flow helps to decrease swelling, inflammation, pain, and muscle spasm.

General advice for a better skating day

Rest & Sleep

Sleep and rest, are perhaps one of the most important aspects of your bodies recovery and performance. It might sound like a broken record but being able to sleep for 7-8hrs can make a big difference on your performance next day.

Exercise depletes energy, fluids, and breaks down muscle. Hydration and the right fuel are only part of training and recovery. What athletes do in the moments during and immediately after competition also determines how quickly their bodies rebuild muscle and replenish nutrients.

Some research suggests that sleep deprivation increases levels of stress hormone, cortisol (Leproult R1, Copinschi G, Buxton O, Van Cauter E, 1997). Sleep deprivation has also been seen to decrease production of glycogen and carbohydrates that are stored for energy use during physical activity. In short, less sleep increases the possibility of fatigue, low energy, reaction time and power will have decreased along with your body’s ability to absorb impact.

Nutrition

Water: Stay hydrated during and after the session. Although for some people beer or a fizzy drink is the first option of hydration, it’s highly recommended to stick to water, as anything else would just delay the re-hydration process.

Food: Food plays massive role on your recovery as it’s fuel for your body. A balanced diet that includes carbohydrates, protein, fats, vitamins and minerals will give you all the nutritional values that you need in order to recover quickly.