How We Use Innate Healing

Around Freshwater there is no shortage of people training hard — surfing, ocean swimming, running the coast walk, triathlon. What is usually short is recovery, and the pattern is consistent enough to be worth writing down.

Complete rest for a tendon. The commonest mistake. Achilles, shoulder and elbow tendons lose capacity when unloaded, so six weeks off produces six weeks of comfort and the same pain on return. These need graded loading, continued past the point where they stop hurting.

Sleeping five or six hours in a heavy training block. Repair happens in sleep. A 4:45 alarm for a dawn session, on top of a midnight bedtime, is a recovery deficit no amount of treatment offsets.

Going up too fast. Most of what we see is a load problem rather than an injury: the volume or intensity rose faster than the tissue adapted. The fix is boring and effective — smaller increments, and a hard week followed by an easier one.

Ignoring iron. Particularly in women and in endurance athletes. Low ferritin explains flat performance and slow recovery, and it needs a blood test through your GP and a specific dose, not a general supplement.

What treatment here does: makes the loading tolerable, and gets someone through a working week while the tissue catches up. It does not replace the four things above and we will say so. We are in Freshwater, ten streets from Balgowlah and about twenty from Manly.