Back to Training After Dental Work Without Wrecking It

Three days after having a lower molar out I went for what I told myself was an easy paddle. It was not easy. My heart rate got up, I was working harder than I admitted at the time, and that evening the socket started throbbing in a way that felt fundamentally different from the ache I had been promised. That was my introduction to dry socket. I tried to save two days and lost eleven.

Standard warning: I am not a dentist and nothing here is medical advice. It is the ladder a reasonably careful amateur put together after getting it wrong once.

After an extraction, the clot is the whole job

The thing sitting in the hole is not a scab. It is the scaffolding your body builds everything else on top of. Dislodge it and you expose bare bone, which is as unpleasant as it sounds and takes a week or more to settle down. The advice I ignored was simple enough: no straws, no spitting, no smoking, nothing hot, and no real exertion for the first two or three days.

Exertion matters because blood pressure and heart rate matter. Hard effort raises both and can restart the bleeding or lift the clot out. Repeatedly bending forward does much the same. Realistically the first forty-eight hours should be walking and nothing else, and days three to five should be easy aerobic work you could hold a conversation through.

Two watersports-specific ones that nobody mentioned to me. Pressure changes are a genuine consideration, so diving on a fresh extraction site is a bad idea and the general advice I got afterwards was to wait until the site had properly closed. And falling into cold water while still numb from an anaesthetic is worse than it sounds, because you cannot feel what you have just bitten.

Crowns and root-treated teeth

A crown is strong. It is not indestructible, and the tooth underneath it, especially a root-treated one, is drier and more brittle than a living tooth. Mine is on an upper front incisor. What I was told, and what has held true for four years, is that it handles normal function without any drama and that a direct impact is an entirely different question. The crown can shear off, the root can crack, and a cracked root usually means losing the tooth altogether.

So I now wear a guard with a level of religious commitment I never had before the crown existed. If you have front restorations and you ride anything fast, that is the trade to make, and I went through the options in custom versus boil-and-bite.

The other thing about crowns: an old mouthguard stops fitting the moment the shape of your teeth changes. My lab guard from before the crown no longer seated properly and I did not notice for weeks, because it still went in. It just was not holding onto anything. If you have had a restoration, a bridge, an extraction or orthodontic work, the guard needs checking and often remaking. That is the most commonly skipped step I know of, and it quietly cancels out the thing you paid for.

Implants run on a completely different clock

I have not had an implant. Two friends have, and I asked both of them a great many questions, because I expect to need one eventually. The short version, as I understand it, is that the post has to fuse with the bone, and that takes months rather than weeks. During that early period the risk is loading it, meaning putting force through the implant before it has integrated, and impact is the worst possible version of that.

Both of them were told to stay away from contact and impact for a defined period, and the two periods were different, because the surgery, the bone and the site were different. That is the part I would push back on if anybody hands you a generic number off the internet, myself included. The American Dental Association material on dental implants gives you the general shape of the process, but the timeline belongs to the person who did the work.

The rough ladder I use now

• Day zero to two after anything surgical: walking. That is the entire programme.
• Day three to seven: easy aerobic, nose breathing, nothing that makes me want to spit, nothing where I could fall.
• Week two: normal training load back on, still no impact and still nothing where a crash is likely.
• Impact and contact: only when the person who did the work says so, and I ask for an actual date rather than a vague soon.
• Guard checked and refitted before the first session back. Every single time.

It is more conservative than most people need. I built it after the dry socket, and after watching a friend crack a temporary crown on a sandwich four days in, which tells you plenty about how fragile the temporary stuff is.

The bits people get wrong

Painkillers make you brave and stupid. If you cannot feel your lip, you have no business being on the water, full stop. Dehydration is the other one. A lot of post-procedure discomfort is made worse by a dry mouth, and if you also train hard and breathe through your mouth for two hours, you are stacking two things that cut saliva at exactly the wrong moment. I went into that at length in sports drinks and enamel.

And if something feels wrong, it usually is. Pain that increases after day three, a foul taste, swelling that grows rather than shrinks, fever, or numbness that has not come back are all reasons to ring somebody rather than tough it out. The NHS page on urgent dental care explains how to get seen outside normal hours, which is not obvious information to go hunting for at ten on a Saturday night with half your face throbbing.

The pattern I keep noticing is that the recovery advice is always duller than we want it to be, and the cost of ignoring it is always longer than the time we were trying to save. Eleven days for two. I still think about that trade.