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Your Daily Dose: 'RICE' is best recipe to heal muscle injury

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By Jackie Hutcherson/St. Louis Post-Dispatch | Friday, May 16, 2008 |

YOUR DAILY DOSE

‘RICE’ is best recipe to heal muscle injury

Q: If you have muscle strain from exercising, is it better to continue with the regimen and work it out? Or should you rest it until it feels better? In this situation, are hot or cold compresses in order?

— L.W., Pearl River, N.Y.

A: Rest. Ice. Compression. Elevation. Remember this formula for “RICE” the next time you’ve overdone it and your recovery time should greatly improve, said Dr. Laney Nelson, an instructor at Logan College of Chiropractic.

And it’s important to ice, not heat, your muscle strain.

“It takes heat twice as long to control the swelling than ice without the effects of controlling pain and discomfort,” Nelson said.

Muscle strains occur when you exercise and the load (think intensity, duration or frequency) is too great, Nelson said. When the load becomes too great for a muscle to bear, muscle fibers begin to separate, causing the strain.

How can muscle strains be avoided? Nelson says that by doing a dynamic warm-up before working out will help elevate your body temperature a few degrees. This will do more to prevent muscular strains than just stretching, she says.

So before you head out the door to work out, do some jumping jacks, lunges, squat thrusts and clap pushups. When your muscles are warm they can handle the load without strain.

Q: My doctor has limited me to six ounces of meat a day. Does this mean before or after cooking? Also, how many ounces is considered a serving?

— A.P., Swansea

A: “Most likely the doctor was talking about cooked meat,” said Natalie Allen, a dietitian at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. That said, a serving of meat is three ounces, so your doctor is allowing you two servings of meat a day.

Three ounces of meat — that includes beef, turkey, chicken, fish and pork — is about the size and thickness of a deck of playing cards, Allen said. Each meat has 7 grams of protein per ounce.

And three ounces of cooked meat might start out as 3.5 ounces uncooked, so when you’re eyeballing meat at the market, remember it really doesn’t lose that much in the cooking process.

Restaurant servings are going to be a double serving, maybe more, so Allen suggests halving your portion and taking the rest home in a doggie bag.

Send health or fitness questions to Jackie Hutcherson, health and fitness editor, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 900 North Tucker Boulevard, St. Louis, Mo. 63101. We’ll try to answer them in a future column.