Recently, I fell running to BART, and landed real, real hard on my butt. Luckily, I didn’t try to brace myself on wet pavement. I’ve seen too many injuries that came from instinctively putting your hands out to catch yourself, and as a massage therapist, two things genuinely scare me. Having to leave this industry before I’m ready to go, and hurting my hands before that day comes. That day, I got lucky on both counts.

During the whole process of grabbing ice and figuring out how bad it actually was, I thought about the number of clients who refuse to use ice no matter how many times it gets recommended. And I get it. Ice is uncomfortable. But it’s also necessary.

When you pull a muscle, you’re actually tearing it. The severity varies, but the process doesn’t. Blood flows through muscle tissue constantly, and when tissue tears, the blood keeps moving anyway. It spills into places it doesn’t belong and the area swells, and a lot of the pain we feel is just that extra pressure reminding us to stop, be still, and let things start to heal. The ice isn’t punishment. It’s the first step.

Once the swelling backs down, you move to heat and gentle movement. If you move too fast, you risk re-injuring something that’s already weakened, and a weakened muscle doesn’t forgive the second insult as easily as it forgave the first. Anyone who’s ever rushed back into a relationship after a bad one knows exactly what that sentence means.

Overprotect it, stay still too long, refuse to move — and you trade one problem for another. Scar tissue forms. Fibers shorten. The muscle stops trusting itself.

Ice. Rest. Movement. The timing is the whole thing, because too soon puts you back at the beginning, and too late builds a new problem on top of the old one.

I think about that a lot. More than just with muscle injuries.

There’s always room for ice. The question is whether you’re willing to sit with it long enough.