Ice is causing the injuries. Yes Ice.
Growing up in the 60’s my next door neighbor, Eddie, an elderly man, who played semi-pro and a little pro ball. His cousin is Stanley Coveleski, a pitcher who is in the hall of fame, he still holds some World Series records, Stanley’s two brothers were pretty good as well.
Anyway, Eddie actually knew most of the greats, Babe, Ty, had a lot of pictures hanging out, playing cards, drinking, barnstorming etc. Eddie told me back in the late 60’s that ice was ruining the arms of pitchers. Eddie was a catcher and for barnstorming trips he got to catch a lot of great pitchers. Eddie said the icing of arms was what was causing pitchers to have so many problems. Eddie said that when you apply ice you stop the healing process, then the stresses and damages don’t get fully repaired, keep repeating and eventually something fails. He predicted that the problem would keep getting worse, because they were starting to have kids ice their arms in little league, creating very unstable arms at an early age.
A few years ago the guy who invented the RICE protocol admitted that he had no clinical basis for using ice. He used it because everyone else was using it, and that it was probably doing more harm than good, because the ice was removing the small amount of inflammation, signaling the body to stop the repair.
Eddies told me that for kids coming up they should keep them on a pitch count and give them more rest, and never any ice, let the body recover on its own. The body will build up the ligaments and tendons to combat the repeated stress, making recovery faster and easier over time. Because back in the day guys would throw 40 or 50 complete games a year and you can’t do that without having a “gorilla arm”, he said all great pitcher’s pitching arm!looked different than their other arm, you could see the buildup, the arms weren’t bigger just different.
Eddie was 75 and could still drop down into a catchers squat and bounce right up, then he’d say, “no ice”.
Turns out the guy was right, unless you’ve got compartment syndrome where you have a dangerous swelling problem you should let your body heal itself naturally. The little bit of swelling is your body putting blood and other fluids at the injury site to enact repairs, and using ice do remove those fluids is dumb. It’s like lowering a moderate fever when you are sick, you are compromiseing your bodies ability to fight the infection. Eddie told me that when he felt himself getting sick when he was younger he would go to a sauna and sweat it out, but now that he was older he’s take the hottest bath he could stand for as long as he could stand it. He lived into his 90’s and I never remember him being sick. I do the sauna trick when I’m sick, and it usually drastically reduces the severity and length of the cold or flu.