http://www.marksdailyapple.com/

Wound healing is an impressive process when you stop to think about it. You’re creating new tissue from scratch. You’re laying down skin, repairing damaged blood vessels, recruiting dozens of immune system mediators to show up to the job site and remake the wounded area. And in most instances, you do a great job of it. The bleeding stops, the wound heals, no scar forms, and the damaged tissue looks and performs as good as new. Remarkable.

But you don’t have to leave it to chance. It turns out that there are many natural ways to heal a wound fast.

Note: these are recommendations for minor wounds you can treat at home. If your wound exhibits any of the following characteristics, consider medical attention:

• Jagged or irregular cuts that may not heal without stitches
• Gaping openings that won’t stop bleeding
• Extreme pain
• Foreign objects
• Signs of infection (foul odor, pain that doesn’t let up, wounds that don’t seem to be healing)
• Animal bites

The good news is that most wounds aren’t that serious and can be treated well at home. Here’s what to do:

1. Do the basics

The basics are basics for a reason: they work.

1. Clean the wound, using irrigation (spraying it with water) and an antiseptic solution like iodine.
2. Cover the wound with a clean bandage. Contrary to what many people believe, a wound shouldn’t “dry out.” That just makes it more painful and slows the healing process. A wound should be covered and kept moist.
3. Change the bandage when you need to.
4. Wait for it to heal.

Those are the basics, but there’s a lot more you can do to speed up the process.

2. Eat more protein

How the body responds to a severe burn is an extreme display of how the body responds to wounds in general. It goes into metabolic overdrive, and one of the most important nutrients supporting the metabolic rate during wound or burn healing is protein.¹

You can make or purchase magnesium chloride oil. To make it, buy magnesium chloride flakes, fill a spray bottle about 3/4 of the way with the flakes, and cover with warm distilled, spring, or reverse osmosis water. Shake to dissolve, then apply it to your skin. It may sting a bit, especially on the wound, but it should assist in healing.

5. Swim in the cold ocean

Now, the warmer and more brackish the water, the more likely it is that flesh-degrading bacteria inhabit it. The bacteria in question, vibrio vulnificus, thrives in brackish (1-2% salinity) water warmer than 64°F. So use caution. Anything above 70 degree water I’d avoid with open wounds. But if your ocean is actually cold, like the Pacific on the California coast, and you’re actually in sea water (3-5% salinity) rather than brackish (1-2%) water, you’re probably safe and in my experience you’ll speed up wound healing. I remember doing this as a kid in Maine—just washing my scrapes with cold ocean water. Some of it is probably the magnesium content, as I described in the previous section. But a lot of it can’t be explained by magnesium. There’s something “else” about going into the ocean with scrapes.

As for the “sharks can smell blood from miles away” thing, that’s nothing to worry about. Sharks do have sensitive olfactory bulbs that can detect small concentrations of substances in the water, like blood. But they still obey the laws of physics. The diluted blood still needs to physically reach them, and they have to determine where it’s coming from and whether it’s worth the trouble.

6. Apply red and infrared light

Both infrared and red light (aka “low level laser therapy” or “phototherapy”) show promise in treating and accelerating the healing process for wounds by increasing blood flow, reducing inflammation, and improving collagen metabolism, but there isn’t any established clinical methodology for treating actual wounds with light devices.² One thing you could try is getting both sunrise and sunset exposure because those are the times of the day most enriched with infrared and red light.

What I’ve done in the past with other types of injuries and general joint pain is use infrared saunas. I like this method a little better because rather than holding a concentrated infrared or red light device directly over the wound and trying to guess how long to apply it, you enjoy the sauna and let indirect rays do the work.

Red light/IR light devices are fairly safe things to try, but I don’t have any specific recommendations for their use for wounds. I am confident, however, that they will probably help. I have and like the Joovv.

7. Apply honey

Honey works well on wounds, acting as a broad-spectrum antibacterial agent and as a general promoter of tissue healing thanks to its antioxidant compounds, acidity, natural hydrogen peroxide production, and osmotic effect. They haven’t figured out all the reasons why it works, but honey just seems to accelerate wound healing.

Manuka honey gets the lion’s share of the accolades for ist wound healing properties, but there’s pretty good evidence that there are even better honeys. Buckwheat honey, for example, was just identified in a recent study for having the highest levels of compounds with the most wound-healing potential.³

If you’re not sure whether your honey will help you heal, one thing I’ve noticed about honey is that the darker the honey, the better. The darker, the more active, and potentially the more effective at healing wounds. So whether it’s Manuka honey, buckwheat honey, or the dark wildflower honey from your local farmer, pretty much any honey will assist in wound healing. Heck, there’s even evidence that basic sugar, white table sugar can increase wound healing when applied topically. After irrigating and cleaning the wound, apply honey.

8. Apply black seed oil

I wrote about black seed oil awhile back for oral use as a supplementary food, but it turns out that topical black seed oil is also an effective wound healing accelerator—especially combined with honey.⁴

Apply a few drops to the wound or scrape. To blend with honey, mix the two together and then apply.

9. Try fasting (for chronic wounds)

To my knowledge, this specific intervention—fasting for chronic wound healing—hasn’t been tested. But Nrf2 is a pathway activated by fasting that has been shown to improve wound healing in diabetics suffering from long term chronic “slow to heal” wounds and ulcers.⁵ Start with a 24 hour fast and go from there.

10. Take vitamin C

As you may know, most mammals produce their own vitamin C. Humans are one of the few mammals who don’t and have to get it from the diet or via supplementation.

To look at the effect of removing vitamin C from the wound-healing process, scientists genetically altered a group of lab mice so that they no longer produced vitamin C. Whereas a normal mouse produces all the vitamin C it needs, these genetically altered mice did not. So they took the vitamin C-null mice and wounded them. One group of wounded mice got vitamin C in their diets. One group did not. The vitamin C-null mice who got vitamin C in their water healed just as well as the normal mice with vitamin C production intact. The vitamin C-null mice who got no added vitamin C had poor healing.⁶

These weren’t humans, but humans are very similar to the vitamin C-null mice. Since most animals produce extra vitamin C after being wounded, humans should also eat a little extra vitamin C when they’re recovering from a wound.

11. Get enough zinc

Zinc is another necessary co-factor in the wound healing process. A study found that diabetics with ulcers had faster healing and smaller wounds after taking 50 mg of zinc sulfate versus a placebo for 12 weeks.⁷ Now, diabetics tend to be deficient in zinc, so this may not apply to everyone with a scratch or scrape. Most people following a Primal eating plan get plenty of zinc through red meat and shellfish—but it’s a good idea to make sure you’re eating enough.

I wouldn’t bother with extra zinc if you just have a small scrape, but if it’s more serious, like a bad burn, then there’s no harm in taking some extra zinc.

You don’t have to try all of these together, but some of them work better in concert. I’d do magnesium oil right off the bat after cleaning and dressing it. Maybe rinse it off in the ocean if it was cold enough. I’d take vitamin C and zinc with meals. I’d take collagen before any red light/IR treatment. I’d add honey and black seed oil every time you change the dressing. If the wound was an old one, I’d fast for a day.

How do you heal a wound? What works for you?

The post 11 Ways to Heal a Wound Fast appeared first on Mark’s Daily Apple.

Originally Posted At: https://breakingmuscle.com/feed/rss

Amidst an intriguing team competition like the 2022 Giants Live World’s Strongest Nation (WSN), there usually might be a standout performer who shines and takes their strength to the next level. Though predicting who would thrive between Team USA (led by Martins Licis, who replaced Robert Oberst for undisclosed reasons) and Team UK (led by Eddie Hall) would be impossible before the action started. On Nov. 26, 2022, in Liverpool, England, the standout happened to be Team USA’s Gabi Dixson.

During the Hercules Hold portion of the contest — where the competitors must utilize their grip strength to hold massive pillars in their hands for as long as possible — Dixson managed to hold her pillars for 1:08:61. (Note: Both teams were scored by their respective athletes’ collective time.) By the end of the competition, Dixson’s time was the second-longest of any of the participating strongmen and strongwomen, bested only by Team UK’s Mark Felix’s time of 1:28:35.

Felix has earned a reputation in the strength sport community when it comes to grip-strength events, winning the Hercules hold in nearly every appearance and having set the World Record for the event with 1:32 at the 2020 Europe’s Strongest Man (ESM).

In a post on her Instagram, Dixson seemed to beam with pride at just having the opportunity to once again meet a strongperson competitor like Felix. The two apparently had crossed paths before during the 2021 Official Strongman Games (OSG). Dixson recalled a humorous story about her hand size compared to Felix and his famous grip strength.

“I remember last year at [the 2021 Official Strongman Games] when I met [Mark Felix],” Dixson started, “I knew about his rep as the ‘grip G.O.A.T’ [greatest of all time] and was curious how my hand size would measure up in comparison (I have always had big hands for a woman and can palm a men’s basketball). So I ran over to him, briefly introduced myself, and asked him to put his hands up to mine. He very politely obliged, and, of course, his hands were bigger. Duh. The poor fella must have thought I was insane at the time!”

Roughly a year later, it doesn’t appear Dixson lost the significance of a performance which put her name in the same conversation as an apparent role model.

“Who would have thought that just over a year later, we’d go No. 1. and No. 2 on the [2022 WSN] stage amongst some of the best of our peers?!” Dixson wrote. “Life is crazy, y’all, and I am forever grateful for the friends I made on this trip and for Mark [Felix] being so kind about a random no-name coming up to him last year.”

As for the team results, Team UK captured the overall title. That said, Dixson’s individual display of grip prowess wasn’t lost in the shuffle. Far from it. It was an elite athlete showing she’s on par with someone she seemed to look up to.

Featured image: @giantslivestrongman on Instagram

The post Gabi Dixson Notches the Second-Longest Hercules Hold at 2022 World’s Strongest Nation appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Originally Posted At: https://breakingmuscle.com/feed/rss

A general perusal of Ken Cooper’s competitive resume and social media platforms will make his Instagram display name “Gingercules” quite appropriate — a play on words concerning Cooper’s hair color and the famed Roman mythological hero Hercules, known for otherworldly strength. He lived up to this public moniker again with a recent upper-body training accomplishment.

On Nov. 28, 2022, Cooper shared an Instagram clip of himself completing lateral raises with 100-pound dumbbells. Per the caption of his post, Cooper’s initial aim was to do 10 reps for a personal record (PR), but an urging from his coach had the athlete complete a 13-rep PR instead. Cooper’s lateral raise set might be even more impressive, considering he detailed that it came near the end of an extensive overall shoulder workout.

Cooper’s training updates these days could hold more significance given what he’s endured health-wise. The athlete suffered a freak injury to both knees during the United States Powerlifting Association (USPA) West Coast Classic in October 2021, while going for a 337.5-kilogram (744-pound) back squat. He tore two tendons and six ligaments while needing a total of 70 staples and was confined to a wheelchair for part of his recovery.

A little over a year later, in October 2022, Cooper shared a video where he deadlifted 412.5 kilograms (909 pounds) raw. Its purpose was to seemingly commemorate all the adversity he overcame on the anniversary of his unfortunate injury. Now, as the 2022 calendar year comes to an end, Cooper appears to be back in the full swing of things, displaying various other powerful sample sizes of his leg strength — like a 310-kilogram (683-pound) raw deficit deadlift for six reps in mid-November 2022.

Knowing that, his recent dumbbell lateral raise PR might just be another noteworthy footnote in the growing career of a potentially dynamic lifter.

Regarding competitions, Cooper doesn’t have an extensive history, featuring in just a handful of career contests at the time of this writing. He does, however, have enough of a quality picture that illustrates how he could fare in the future on sanctioned lifting platforms. According to Open Powerlifting, Cooper won the 2022 USPA West Coast Classic event while competing raw and in the 140-kilogram weight class.

Here’s an overview of his top stats from the contest:

Ken Cooper | 2022 USPA West Coast Classic Top Stats

• Bench Press — 257.5 kilograms (567.7 pounds)
• Deadlift — 410 kilograms (903.9 pounds)
• Total — 667.5 kilograms (1,469.8 pounds)

*Note: Cooper did not squat at the competition.

With his power and strength apparently returning back to a high level, a bright competitive outlook could be on the horizon for Cooper. Regardless of what happens next, what seems clear is that he won’t let an unforeseen traumatic event stop him from aiming high with his ambitions in the gym.

Featured image: @gingercules on Instagram

The post Powerlifter Ken Cooper Plows Through 100-Pound Dumbbell Lateral Raises for 13 Reps appeared first on Breaking Muscle.