Should You Rest or Keep Moving After an Injury?
RICE has been quietly retired by the people who invented it. What replaced it, and how to judge the line between protecting an injury and babying it.
Most people were taught RICE — rest, ice, compression, elevation. It is worth knowing that Gabe Mirkin, the physician who coined the acronym in 1978, publicly walked back the rest and ice components decades later. The evidence moved on.
Why complete rest backfires
Immobilised tissue loses capacity fast. Muscle strength drops measurably within a week of disuse. Tendons and ligaments lose tensile strength. Joints stiffen, and the nervous system starts treating the area as fragile — which is difficult to unlearn later.
Inflammation, meanwhile, is not the enemy. It is the delivery mechanism for repair. Aggressively suppressing it in the first days may slow the healing you are trying to accelerate.
What replaced RICE
The current framework is PEACE & LOVE. It is a clumsy acronym but a good model, because it explicitly covers what happens after the first few days — which is where the old advice went quiet.
The first days are PEACE: Protect, Elevate, Avoid anti-inflammatories, Compress, Educate. After that comes LOVE: Load, Optimism, Vascularisation, Exercise. The transition from protection to loading is the part that matters, and it usually happens sooner than people expect.
How to judge the line
The practical test is what symptoms do over the next 24 hours, not what they do during the activity:
- Discomfort during activity that settles within an hour — you are in the right range
- Pain that climbs during the activity and forces you to stop — too much
- Feeling fine at the time but noticeably worse the next morning — too much, delayed
- No sensation at all from the exercise — probably too little to drive adaptation
Most people can tolerate a good deal more than they assume, provided the load is chosen sensibly. Rehabilitation is not about avoiding all discomfort; it is about staying inside a range that stimulates repair without provoking a flare.
When rest genuinely is the answer
There are real exceptions. Suspected fractures, complete tendon ruptures, acute joint instability and bone stress injuries all need protection and a proper diagnosis before loading. If you cannot weight-bear at all, if the joint gives way, or if there is obvious deformity, get it assessed rather than working through it.
“The question is rarely rest or move. It is how much to move, starting when.”
Written by the clinical team at Caring Hands Physio Clinics. General information only — it is not a substitute for an individual assessment. If something here sounds like your problem, book an appointment and we will tell you what applies to you specifically.
