Methods Of Muscle Pain Relief
While certain exercises are good for muscle pain relief, you should pay attention to your body's response. If you get muscle cramps while exercising, stop immediately and don’t try to push on hoping that the cramp will just go away. You increase your chances if serious muscle injury if you attempt to "run through" a muscle cramp.When you get a muscle cramp, there are some things you can do for muscle pain relief. Stretch the cramped muscle with one hand while gently kneading and squeezing the centre of the muscle with the fingers of the other hand. Feel how it has contracted and try to stretch it in the opposite direction.
As an example, if you have a calf muscle cramp, put your foot flat on the ground and lean forward without lifting your heel off the ground. If the cramp is so bad that you cannot stand on your legs, sit on the ground and extend the leg with the muscle cramp. Reach forward and grab the toes or upper part of the foot pulling it toward the knee. This helps with muscle pain relief. Then try and walk it out for a few minutes to allow the blood circulation going back into the muscles. Avoid resuming exercising right away.
A method that many athletes use to prevent muscle soreness and stiffness is to take a cold shower or bath. This reduces the trauma to overworked muscles as the cold helps reduce and prevent muscle soreness by constricting the blood vessels thereby reducing the blood flow and inflammation to the area. This technique is used by Olympic athletes who are known to plunge into icy cold water for muscle pain relief after a tough workout. Racehorses are hosed down with cold water after a race.
If you are disinclined to jump into icy cold baths after a workout, try using ice packs. For the first 24 to 72 hours after an intensive sporting activity or workout, apply an ice pack for 20 to 30 minutes at a time every hour. It is important to avoid heat since using a heating pad or hot water bottle to apply heat to sore muscles causes blood vessels to dilate and increase circulation to the area resulting in more swelling.
Heat may feel good but it increases muscle soreness and stiffness so it is not advisable to use it for more than 20 minutes every hour. You can try contrast therapy where a hot pad is applied for four minutes and an ice pack for a minute. When the muscle swelling and soreness are reduced over 3 or 4 days, you can resume taking hot baths to relax muscles.
Taking an anti-inflammatory such as aspirin helps to reduce muscle inflammation and ease pain for muscle pain relief. However, you should check with your doctor or the pharmacist before taking such medication since you could have a condition that causes an adverse reaction to the drug. There are also recommended food remedies for muslce pain relief.
There are also creams that contain salicylate, which is the active ingredient in aspirin, to reduce inflammation and ease pain. This could be a safer alternative since they are greaseless and won't irritate skin. And since they are applied externally, there won't be problems of stomach upset associated with taking aspirin for muscle pain relief.
