There are two main types of muscle pain:
1. Short term [ like the pain you feel after a battle march ]
2. Long term [ or what is called “chronic pain” by doctors ] like a pain in your shoulder that has been there for months and won’t go away.
I’ll be covering shoulder pain, neck pain, knee pain and foot pain in future postings after I finish with the back pain postings.
In order to understand how these two are different, we need to look at how muscles work.
If we take the fingers of our hands and inter-twine or lock them together, we can see that each finger is sat beside a partner. Muscles are made up of fibers which interlock with each other.
If we take those fingers and only apply a little pressure, we can slide them back and forth against each other. This is the way a HEALTHY muscle should work.
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The muscle contains nerves. Some of these nerves are pain nerves and some are control nerves. When we want to walk, we don’t actually “just walk” automatically. A very complicated series of events takes place. First the brain has to know exactly which muscles to move. This has been programmed into our brains when we were children and learned to walk. So a healthy brain knows exactly which muscles to move, and most importantly in which order. Sometimes people with brain injuries get the program “mixed up” or parts of the program are missing.
The brain then sends an electrical signal to the first muscle. In the case of walking, it is to a very important and not well known small muscle behind the knee called the popliteus.
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More about that in the postings on knee pain. The electrical signal makes the muscle fibers contract or shorten. The muscle contracts. Other muscles are activated. These muscles in turn shorten and lengthen, shorten and lengthen as we walk.
A muscle is a living thing and needs fuel to work to convert to energy. A car takes in petrol [fuel] converts the petrol to energy [ to move the car ] and produces waste which comes out the exhaust pipe [ poisonous gas – carbon monoxide and water vapour ].
Our muscles do the same. They take in fuel [ from the blood stream ] do work - to contract and lengthen the muscle fibers and produce waste.
This waste is what is important. Three acids are formed in the waste. The two most important are called lactic acid and carbonic acid. Lactic acid is what you find in sour milk. With healthy muscles, these three acids are passed out of the tissues and into the urine.
But there are some problems with these acids. While they are in the tissues, they mix with other chemicals and slow down the amount of blood coming into and out of the muscle tissue. This means that the muscle is not getting the nutrition that it needs and most importantly that the waste is not being removed effectively. Acid stings, and if enough of it builds up, you will feel pain in your muscles, just as your calf muscles ache and sting when you’re on a really long tab.
Provided the muscle tissue is healthy, after some rest, the lactic acid eventually flushes itself out of the muscles, and you slowly get back to normal.
However in an unhealthy muscle [ e.g. one that has never been stretched ], a glue can be formed from lactic acid and some other chemicals which will literally stick the fibers together. This is not good. Some people get this in their intestines, where the intestines will actually glue to each other causing pain.
This is an example of short term muscle pain.
So what is an unhealthy muscle ?
All sorts of things can form in muscles. The lump you see in the photo was produced by someone’s body trying to protect the area from repeated injections in one place.
Medical photo:
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When a muscle is overused, tight knots can occur. In this case, the muscle fibers become entangled with each other like a ball of wool that a cat has been playing with. Instead of the fibers running alongside each other, they have become entangled. This knot is sensitive to the touch and causes the muscle to shorten. This in turn pulls against the points where the muscle attached to the bone via tissue called tendons.
The pain from these knots will stay until pressure is used to release them.
In the next posting, I’ll cover some things to help with short term and long-term muscle pain.
Summary: healthy muscle – no knots, no adhesions, no lactic acid. Muscle is able to be stretched without pain.
Dave
