Ice-ice-baby ice….: new products assist in injury prevention and treatment

How many of us have heard the phrase, "Ice it" and you'll be fine. In fact, icing or applying cold applications to a muscle, tendon or ligament can be the difference between injury recovery in a day or two and a week. Yet icing can get messy especially when the ice melts. The need arises at night when you want to rest in a chair or couch and put ice on an injured or sore muscle. No longer do you have to take ice cubes and roll them up in a wet towel. Enter the reusable cool pack or the hot-cold pack. We 've seen products like cold packs for years. Too often the case is that the ice pack leaks, it gets too stiff to apply to a wide area. The trouble is that our arms, legs and joints are cylindrical and not flat. One new product that can assist is the TOREX sleeve (www.torexhealth.com). It comes in a shape that can be worn like a sleeve on your leg or arm. Keep the TOREX sleeve in your freezer and insert it into an outer sleeve to keep it in place on the affected area on your arm or leg. Sizes vary for men and women. It can also be used for heat applications. The TOREX and similar plastic products with the gel-type mix inside the outer casing cannot be heated up in a microwave. I've made the mistake with other similar products: they expand too rapidly and leak or burst. Same thing for the TOREX. Heating up a pad is not as easy as the "toss in the freezer mode" for the icing process. You need to heat up a bowl of water and place the sleeve in the water. To be honest, the TOREX will find most its use in the "ice" process. Look for TOREX in specialty stores or check out their website. Similar products can be found in the health and fitness aisles in major grocery stores and in sports or running specialty stores.

I'd recommend that every serious runner have an ice pack in their freezer at home. Products like the TOREX can be especially useful on an entire knee or shoulder or elbow. Similar gel-type ice packs can be wrapped on sore ankles or feet.

There are other home remedies that can do the icing trick without messy melting water. For all you Achilles heel pain sufferers, try the old frozen pea bag treatment. It conforms to your heel and does the trick for a good 15 minutes.

I never talked about the need for icing until the mid-life of running hit. Now, icing is a runner's best friend for longevity on the trails and roads

ENJOY THE RUN...

--Dave Watt

Executive Director

COPYRIGHT 2008 American Running & Fitness Association
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning