HIIT and recovery question

I am having a rethink about this.
So I have a elbow injury which seems to be a partial tear of a ligament.
So I am working only legs or do sprints or abs. Essentially avoiding working the elbow.

However I am reading/watching some things that seem to indicate recovery is for your complete body, and you should recover fully before getting to your next HIIT session.
Could that be correct. My elbow hasn't improved much at all in the last few weeks IMHO.

It's just my opinion, but I think you should be good to go with your sprint type workouts. I don't see why that should impair your elbow's recovery. Might help by increasing the blood flow.

Inflammation causes your body to make cortisol, which is a steroid. If you have inflammation, cortisol is failing in its primary purpose. Its side effect is to promote belly fat, and if your inflammation isn't gone, then further HIIT would increase cortisol and anyway its not doing its primary job, so it just locks in belly fat. Or some such thing is what I am finding. HIIT -> full recovery = Low cortisol. Then repeat HIIT. With HIIT you must recover fully, else you're damaging yourself.

Are you completely avoiding all strain on the elbow? That seems a possible reason that it hasn't improved at all. Based on my personal experience with injuries and the opinions of people like Ido Portal (among others) who seem to know what they're talking about, you should be exercising that elbow joint.

Not enough to cause real pain or reinjure it, obviously, but you should be testing the limits of its range of motion and the minimum weights it can handle at various angles, and constantly push those limits. Joints, tendons, and ligaments have very limited blood flow, which is why they recover more slowly than muscle, so you should be moving the joint to increase circulation there as much as possible. Also, moving the joint will allow it to heal with the proper range of motion, rather than possibly scarring over in some dysfunctional way.

In any case, I doubt your HIIT is the issue here. "Recovery" from your HIIT should only be relevant as regards the short-term, acute damage that the HIIT directly induced, not a long-term, chronic issue like your elbow. Non-HIIT inflammation impacting cortisol and making you fat seems like a theory that simply doesn't hold up; if that were the case, nobody with an autoimmune disorder or a chronic joint issue of any kind would ever benefit from HIIT and only get fatter and fatter, since they always have inflammation.

There's some truth to that. The elbow used to not hurt the instant I hit the gym and for ~1hr afterwards. I did not go easy on it, I'd still bench and lat and tricep and reverse bench the same weight. It didn't care. I am watching some videos on this and that seemed to indicate recover fully before next session. My next few weeks I'll do sprints and hopefully that would result in the elbow getting rested and fully come back.
I may even be prolonging the injury in my sleep, the fully folded position causes it to further tear I think.
I also have the ability to not feed any inflammation for weeks by eating near 0 carbs, then I eat a few more carbs and boom, pain @ 8 or 9 from literally nowhere.

Nightly Orange wrote:<snip> if that were the case, nobody with an autoimmune disorder or a chronic joint issue of any kind would ever benefit from HIIT and only get fatter and fatter, since they always have inflammation.

Actually I'm reading Chris Kresser - RHR: Chronic Stress, Cortisol Resistance, and Modern Disease - but this just struck me.
Chronically high levels of hormones are not an indicator of future fatness. They're a predictor of present fatness.
As in, if you have high insulin - you wont be getting fatter, it means you're already fat.
So, high cortisol is keeping my belly from losing that last 2-5 lb. Whether the elbow is an indicator or not is definitely debatable, but the cortisol is keeping my few softball sized grabs in place.