One Medscape article shows just how common ankle sprains are. This article reports that more than 23,000 Americans require medical care for a sprained ankle every day. If you’re among those 23,000 people today, you’re probably wondering how long it might take for your ankle to recover. Most mild ankle sprains can take up to four weeks to recover completely. However, moderate or severe sprains can take between two and six months to heal. Many factors can cause these sprained ankle recovery times to vary from person to person. Here are three factors that could affect your recovery time:
- How severe your sprain is
As mentioned above, how severe your ankle sprain is can affect the time it takes to recover. But why is that? Each level of ankle sprain causes progressively worse damage to the ligaments of the ankle. People with a mild sprain have often simply overstretched the ligament, but moderate sprains often feature partial tearing of a ligament. The most severe ankle sprains are those that cause almost complete or total tearing of the ankle ligament. Thus, the recovery time for an individual sprain typically increases based on the severity of the ligament damage.
- The amount of time you rest your ankle
The amount of rest you give your ankle is another factor that can affect the recovery time for an ankle sprain. The body does most of its healing while you’re resting, so the more you rest, the more time your body has to heal the injured ankle ligament. The other side of the coin is that not resting your ankle could lead to less healing. People who try to do normal activities with an ankle sprain can increase the damage to the injured ligament, which can cause healing to take even longer.
- Getting help from a physical therapist
A third factor that can affect your ankle sprain recovery time is whether you get help from a physical therapist. These specialists can help you find the right balance of resting and therapeutic exercises. They can also use techniques like instrument assisted soft tissue mobilization (IASTM) to increase the blood flow to your injured ankle. Improving blood flow to the injury allows it to get more oxygen and nutrients and can help speed up the healing process.
Visiting Peak Performance can help reduce your sprained ankle recovery time
We’ve helped many patients decrease the recovery time of their sprained ankles. To start with, our team can do a free screening of the ankle to determine how severe the sprain is. Then we combine this information with the many beneficial therapy methods at our disposal, and this allows us to create a personalized recovery plan for you that may include:
- Electrical stimulation
- Therapeutic exercises
- Anodyne® therapy
- IASTM
- Kinesiology taping
Do you want to start getting our help with your ankle sprain recovery? Contact us today for more information or to schedule an initial appointment.
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