A concept most people are confused about. Sometimes you’ll hear someone say “put some ice on that”, others “put some heat on that”. Well, the confusion stops here. I’m here to tell you all about heat therapy, otherwise known as thermotherapy and when to make use of it.
I love my heat packs, I’ve spent much time trying out different types of heat packs, different sizes and am pretty much glued to my heat pack. We go everywhere together. So, what’s the big fuss?
When it comes to muscles, they crave the attention of heat application. Heat helps increase blood flow to the area, and for muscles, that increase in blood flow helps with and promotes muscle relaxation. When muscles are relaxed, they are less tense and uncomfortable and therefore, will decrease pain that is associated with any muscular component. Heat also increases tissue extensibility. Extensibility refers to individual muscle fibers that make up a muscle or tendon. If these fibers have good extensibility, they are able to move and glide over each other to perform a specific movement. Poor extensibility of muscle fibers means that they cannot glide effortlessly over each other during movement.
So where am I going with this? Well tissue extensibility, is related to tissue flexibility. Flexibility of a muscle refers to how well the muscle or tendon is able to lengthen to allow normal movement of a joint to occur. So, if your muscle fibers are not able to glide smoothly over each other during movement, the extent at which the muscle or tendon lengthens will also decrease. This will decrease the overall strength and power output of your muscle performance and increase your susceptibility to injury.
Most of the time, stretching our muscles and releasing tension build up through massages, dry needling, adjustments etc helps keep our muscles happy. However, applying heat to our muscles is a convenient, time and cost-effective technique that helps achieve similar results and is often extremely overlooked. Heat packs alone allow you as the patient to have more power over your pain levels as you can apply heat to your muscles anytime and anyplace.
Now, unfortunately not everyone feels those same benefits as some conditions may have a vascular component involved where increasing blood flow to the area may make the pain levels a whole lot worse than better, however, this will usually be recognized or diagnosed by your practitioner and therefore they will guide you accordingly on what to do.
Bottom line, heat packs alone may not take the pain entirely away and resolve the solution completely, but it definitely helps decrease pain levels associated with any muscular component. So next time you are in a predicament between heat or ice, remember, muscles love heat!
If you don’t have a heat pack or are unsure where to get one, visit my website under related products. We have extra length heat packs available, in a non-allergic soft material removable cover with many different colours to choose from.
