What is tissue tolerance?
The whole Tahoe region has been hit hard with a mass amount of snow this 2022-2023 winter and everyone is learning about this concept whether they knew it or not. With all the snow shoveling and snow removal our bodies are tired and beat up. This created a lot of injuries that may be new to you, but coming into the office were a lot of the same injuries repeatedly from snow removal. This can apply to a lot of repetitive or overuse type injuries that happen to all of us at one point or another in our lives.
The easy answer for what tissue tolerance is would be how much activity your body can handle before it breaks down. Every day we do activity, or even inactivity for some tissues (do not think that is your only way out of this), there is breaking down of our tissues in body (muscles, ligaments, etc.). When we sleep and take time away from that activity, this is our recovery time. If we do that activity again the next day, there is more tearing of those same tissues and then some recovery again. If we perform that same activity again the next day without letting that recovery occur, we are now going to cross that line into injury of that tissue. I want to point out a key factor is that the recovery period is critically important. When you give yourself time to recover, you can perform some of those repetitive tasks over and over again for days, months, and even years with no injury. This explains why you would not go to the gym every day of the week and just do arm workouts because there would be no recovery time and at some point, will fail and cause pain and injury. So going back to shoveling snow this past winter, when you are shoveling snow day after day and sometimes multiple times a day, there is not enough time for recovery and the tissue or muscles that are predominately being used will fail due to lack of recovery. This is one reason you may be getting more of these back, shoulders, or wrist injuries that you have not had before.
This concept of tissue tolerance hopefully makes sense for these other injuries outside of the big traumas like a slip and fall or car accident. It is this tolerance that happens with a job you have been doing for 30 years and never having issues before but now you cannot perform this task or activity because now it hurts.
What should you do to combat these types of injuries? First off, make sure there is some recovery time between these tasks or activities. Whether that is a vacation or time off or even 15 seconds of stretching every 30 minutes, it is all helpful. Second, try and make that recovery happen faster with various things like movement, treatment, nutrition, and/or sleep can all be really helpful. Last would be toning down how much of that activity you are doing. This would be why diversifying activity or cross training would be a great option.
Feel free to ask any more questions you may have and see you soon.
Tahoe’s Premiere Sports Chiropractor
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