Earthing and Grounding, an Essential Healing and Recovery Tool

As a sports chiropractor working with many top athletes, my job is to keep them healthy, maximally efficient, and help them snap back from brutal training programs and all-out performances. In this capacity, I am always looking for state-of-the art methods with which to help optimize performance and recovery from training, competition, injuries, and surgery.

More than ten years ago I discovered Earthing to be so beneficial in my work that I routinely recommend it now to most everyone I counsel and treat, including football players, marathoner runners, cyclists, and motocross racers. I use Earthing sleep systems and patches to reduce the common injuries and fatigue encountered by cyclists at one of the world’s premiere sports events, the grueling Tour de France.  

My observations and feedback enable me to say, without any reservation, that Earthing is an indispensible healing and recovery tool, something even beyond significant, for any treatment or recovery regimen as it relates to injury, surgery, and maximum athletic performance. I tell my people to sleep grounded at night and ground themselves during the day as much as they can.

After injury, I have consistently found less scarring, pain, and redness among individuals who ground themselves in comparison to what you would normally expect to see. Scars are less red and tender, and smaller in size. They look more similar to the surrounding normal tissue than what you would expect from scarring. Visible external inflammation decreases rapidly. Internal inflammation, as seen through various imaging methods, does the same.

Athletes tell me frequently they are able to get into their previous “groove” and proper techniques quicker than expected after injury. Therapy and rehab go better and faster. They say their doctors are surprised at the rate of healing, restored function, and tissue repair. This consistent feedback confirms that Earthing is helping in some very significant ways.

From many years of experience treating the injuries of athletes, I find that Earthing offers healing benefits above and beyond the results typically seen with icing. Regardless of the extent of the injury, pain reduction is significant with Earthing compared to ice; frequently, 40 or 50 percent less. I have never experienced that kind of healing with icing.

I tell my clients and patients that Earthing serves as a background, a foundation, for stabilizing and enhancing the physiology so that body’s internal mechanisms work together to create a high level of repair and healing, whether from surgery, exhaustion, or from daily life in general. Earthing promotes better sleep and all the things associated with faster recovery from day to day activity. People have more energy, less pain, better function, and require less sleep. All these are indications that the body is repairing itself and functioning more efficiently.

From my experience, whether you are sick or injured, the more consistently you ground yourself and the more time you spend grounded, the greater your body’s ability to heal, repair, and regenerate, and operate optimally.

For athletes, there is clearly a positive effect on biology, leading to heightened recovery from day-to-day activity that facilitates competing at a higher level. Recovery is everything. Competition and training tear the body down. Without adequate recovery, the body will eventually break down or the person sets himself or herself up for injury. If you can sleep less and respond better, and train harder, which is what we see from Earthing, than the assumption can be made that you are affecting the recovery mechanism and repairing the body better and faster.

These kinds of observations are why I tell my athletes to get grounded and get better!