Take care of your acute muscle injuries!

Recently, a friend of mine suffered a muscle injury when training for a race involving running, climbing, getting through mud etc (you know, one of those popular crazy fun races). I gave her some instructions on how to take care of the injury the fist couple of days, and encouraged her to make an appointment with a physiotherapist, as it is important with rehabilitation to get full function back. Shortly thereafter, she told me that some acquaintances mentioned that they probably pulled a muscle or got a small rupture in various muscles, and she was asked; shall I put heat on? This is actually the most common mistake...

For this reason, I chose the topic of acute muscle injuries for this post. 

Clarification of acute injury; an injury that occurs at a specific time with tissue damage as a result, such as damage to the menisci, ligaments, muscles, and bone fractures. While tendon inflammation/irritation, stress fractures and so on are termed overload damage. 

In all acute injuries, there is tissue injury with bleeding as a result, although there are some very few exceptions - but I’ll put no focus on it now. The primary goal is always to stop the bleeding as quickly as possible, as the accumulated blood will prolong healing time. The reason for this is that the body will have to put a lot of time and energy to take care of the blood that leaked into the tissue, and has to be absorbed or decomposed, instead of focusing on renuilding the injured tissue. The days after the injury, the compression bandage is used to prevent the secondary swelling, which consists of fluid/edema that collects in the area because of the inflammatory process that initiates, and it's an advantage to keep down that swelling as well. 

There's an ongoing inflammation in the acute phase, which lasts three days. During this time you should: 

• Take care of tissue and unload, that is, try not to work so much with the injured area, let the muscle or joint rest, and only do circulatory movements without any load

• Keep compression bandage on 

• Use ice on the area for pain relief 

What you should NOT do during the acute phase: 

• Take anti-inflammatory tablets. In recent studies researcher have found that initially healing is faster and the patient can get started earlier with exercise and get back to training faster. BUT, a few weeks later, those who took anti-inflammatory medication have weaker tissue in the injured area than those who had not taken the medication. Although, we do not know how long this weakness of the tissues continues. How ever, my opinion is; better to be safe than sorry. Do you need pain relief, use paracetamol 

• Adding heat to the injured area - this increases circulation and increases the inflammatory process, which is not good for healing, as the symptoms from the inflammation will increasy

• Massage and different massage equipment – gives the same negative effects as heat 

See you! 

Shirin Zarur