The one true mistake to be made in the proliferation stage is to give in to a cyle of booms and busts. For proliferation to go right, we must diligently build activity levels and carefully listen to the body’s signals for feedback on how we are doing. A boom-and-bust cycle is the exact opposite of this. When a person is not hurting or at least feels better, she thinks “I used to be able to do that activity, I want to do that right now!” Then she goes and does the thing that she is not ready for and subsequently gets super sore, painful and inflamed. Then she has to spend the next days or even week back in the inflammatory stage. When she finally feels better, she jumps for joy thinking “Oh I am really better this time!” and goes out and does something similar to last time, still without having built up to it. She gets sore and painful again and the cycle repeats indefinitely.
As previously stated in proliferation gone right, no one appears to be completely immune to some amount of overdoing it during this stage. The difference between doing this right and succumbing to boom-and-bust cycles then is the severity of the overdoing it. The boom represents a large leap forward in activity. The subsequent bust is not just a day of being a little sore but requires that the person take days or even weeks of drastically reducing activity levels to recover.
The healing tissues consequently spend much more time in the inflammatory stage overall as they are repeatedly set back. This results in more scar tissue formation. Adjacent tissues can also be disrupted or sensitized by being exposed to the chemicals of the inflammatory milieu. When the tissues are not in the inflammatory stage, they may never get properly “trained” in flexibility and strength because they never experienced manageable loads that they can adapt to. Instead, the boom cycle that introduces unmanageable loads reinjures the tissues.
If boom and bust cycles continue long enough, the body can eventually solidify a shoddy, disorganized scar tissue riddled repair. The tissue repair in question is left sensitized, weakened, and adaptively shortened. It’s not a great situation. However, do not despair if you are reading this and this sounds like something that you are doing right now or have done in the past. The sooner the individual can pull out of the boom-and-bust cycles the better. Also, there are ways to reboot healing and “start over” even with a disgrace of a repair.
Stay tuned.