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Calf Muscle Injuries Are Significant, They Need Lots Of Rehabilitation Work!Avoid calf muscle injuries - do calf strenghtening exercise and lots of calf stretches.
You often hear that calf injuries are the most common injuries happening to athletes because of their active sports that require lots of fast starts and stops, hence putting great pressure on their legs and calf muscles, causing them vulnerable to painful tears.
How about you (and I) and many who exercise?
Well, calf muscle injuries won't spare you either.
They'll hit you any time if you're engagaing in cardios like running or any other weight-bearing exercises that require lots of your leg muscles.
Even in toning exercise since you'll be using your legs for support in lots of exercises (e.g. squat, the lunge and etc.)!
The chances of getting your calf muscles injured remain high.......... For us ladies, we're even more vulnerable to the injuries because wearing high heels cause us to have short, contracted calf muscles!
So when you exercise, the tightness in your calf sometimes won't be able to take on the sudden stress, so they strain and tear and you end up suffering ugly tear and pain. Coming back to the subject, do you know what are calf muscle injuries? They're injuries of the calf occurring in the forms of tears of the juncture between the medial half of your calf muscle (the inner part, known as the gastrocnemius) and the Achilles' tendon.
You would have sudden pain in your calf, accompanied by a popping sound you can actually hear. Sometimes you can feel as if someone's kicking your leg in the middle of your calf muscle. The Causes? You'd think that overuse is the culprit that causes calf injuries. Not really. The culprit is actually too much hard running, sudden fast starts and stops and the hard pressure and force you exert on your legs when you exercise! Another cause of calf muscle injuries is inflexibility due to tight calf muscles, when you exercise hard and then don't do enough stretching for the muscles. You'd be smart to do exercise to stregnthen the muscles at the front of the shin and to stretch the muscles at the back of your calf, to prevent calf injuries or minimize the chance of a recurrence. One lesser known cause is due to you running in different shoes with varying heel-to-forefoot heights.
When the injuries hit you, it's bad, bad news - One, you'll probably find it hard to continue with your exercise and to walk even. Two, your calf muscle will be swollen come next day. Thereafter, it may turn blue and black. Three, you'll have to lay off exercising for a while because the injuries could sometimes be quite disabling when they occur.
So there goes your plan to exercise according to schedule!
Worse, negative training time sets in!
The good news is that most calf muscle injuries can be prevented.
I'd say that early, appropriate and right treatment is the best if you want to get your calf muscles back into shape again in as short a time as possible.
In most cases this early treatment will prevent you having recurring calf injuries later on. In this case, immediately apply ice to the injured calf so that the amount of bleeding and subsequent swelling is reduced and the amount of muscle damage is very much arrested. You apply ice several times a day for the first 72 hours.
In the next 2 - 3 days immediately after the ice treatment, use compression bandage to further ease swelling. This is followed by elevation of your lower leg as much as possible. After this, your treatment should gear more toward doing exercises to stretch out the healing calf tissues to prevent them from further tears. These exercises should include stretching both of your major calf muscles:- 1) Gastrocnemius - Stretch felt high up in your calf. 2) Soleus - Stretch felt down in your calf. If you correctly and appropriately treat your calf muscle injuries and do adequate rehabilitation, you won't have to encounter recurrence of them that often.
So do calf strengthening exercises and lots and lots of calf stretches to keep your calf strong and flexible. They are the best preventive measures around! Bookmark this page? Click one of the little buttons below and you're done.
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