Nutrition During Injury Recovery – Managing your food intake for healing

Your easy-to-follow guide for how to adjust your diet when dealing with an injury. We'll look at nutrition hacks to help your recovery from injury.

Whether they are mild or severe, injuries can impact our day-to-day activities. When our activity levels change, so to do our bodies’ nutritional requirements. Find out what and how we should be eating to assist our bodies to bounce back to full fitness in this comprehensive guide.

Unfortunately, for healthy active people, injuries are somewhat inevitable in our pursuit of fitter stronger bodies.

It makes sense that if we get injured, we should make an appointment with our GP or physio. But it’s also important to consider what impact our dietary choices can have on our injury and what we can do to fast track our road to recovery.

The role of good nutrition when it comes to injury recovery

While a healthy diet can’t keep you guaranteed to remain injury-free, getting essential nutrients is vital to supporting recovery and, in many cases, can speed the process up.

In almost all cases, poor nutrition will hamper your body’s ability to repair itself and you’ll be out of action longer than perhaps necessary.

Injuries can take many forms and can range from acute to chronic, due to overuse for example. They may affect soft tissue – our muscles, tendons and ligaments, or our bones or our nerves.

Now you may think if you’re injured you just need to cut back on calories. After all, you’re not going to be moving about as much or performing the same workout sessions or sports activities. So, your body doesn’t need as much food, right?

Well, it’s not that simple.

Repairing and rebuilding a body part takes time and energy. How much energy depends on the individual nature of the specific injury and other factors surrounding your activity levels and daily needs.

Essentially, we have 3 main goals for our nutrition during times of injury:

By considering the role of the macronutrients we consume and choosing foods to support our recovery, we can give our bodies the best chance to recover from injury quickly and efficiently.

Following a balanced meal plan that includes a variety of whole foods is best for a healing body. Additionally, certain supplements may be of benefit to speed up the recovery process.

Our body’s response to injury

Generally speaking, no matter the type of injury suffered, our body goes through a similar process as it repairs itself.

Obviously, the severity of the injury will determine the duration of recovery, but we can think of the recovery process as having 3 distinct stages:

We can use the power of nutrition to assist in each stage of injury recovery.

Read the next article in the series to learn more about injury nutrition.