Swelling after an injury is your body's way to prevent further injury until your ankle can heal. The swelling helps to immobilize the joint but it also prevents you from starting rehabilitation.
If you've ever had a significant injury that eventually required surgery you know that swelling around a joint can and often does delay restorative surgery.
Surgeons must wait until the swelling goes down until they are able to do surgery.
So it makes sense that you must get the swelling out of your ankle before you are able to start the rehabilitation process.
What are the best ways to reduce swelling?
There are many ways to reduce swelling but most of them are very slow and are passive, meaning you will have to wait until your swelling goes down with little or no action on your part.
Ice and elevation are the most conservative approach and consequently the approach that most doctors recommend.
Ice whirlpools are an aggressive approach and when combined with specific and activities during the "thaw" period, a person can experience dramatic reduction in swelling. For advanced, specific, step by step instructions about how to reduce swelling fast (in as little as 2-4 hours), you can go to the following link:
reducing the swelling of a sprained ankle
Be certain that you do not have any structural damage to your ankle before taking an aggressive approach to reducing swelling and starting the rehab project. Only start aggressive rehabilitation of a sprained ankle after a doctor has given you the ok.
If you have structural damage such as a torn ligament or torn tendons or possibly chipped or broken bones, you will further injure your ankle and make the rehab process longer and much more painful.
Be smart, if your ankle hurts really bad a day or so after the injury occured or if you feel any instability, see a doctor right away.
If your ankle is just sore, but swelling has kept you from starting rehab, get the swelling down as fast as possible so you can start rehabilitating your ankle.
Next time we'll talk about strengthening your ankle so you can minimize and maybe eliminate ankle sprains in the future.
Hope you get your sprained ankle back into shape fast-
Bret Mundt suffered from repeated ankle sprains throughout his basketball career. Finally he discovered a rehab program that reduced swelling in less than 4 hours and completely rehabbed a sprained ankle in less than a week. you can learn more about the program at www.fastrehab.com