Why Acupuncture For Runners
We love to run. Many of us want to run every single day. Hell, we’d run three times a day if our bodies could handle the miles to recover day after day, week after week. At least I would if I got paid to run for a living with the opportunity to run with my friends and community.
I don’t get paid to run for a living but I do make a living working with runners so they stay healthy, run faster, and continue to run with their friends and community. Here are the 5 ways we do it with acupuncture.
Assessment
Speeding Up the Recovery Process
Loosening Tight Muscles
Activating Weaker Muscles
Finding and Clearing Myofascial Trigger Points
1. Assessment
Part of running is that we put a pounding on our bodies. This comes with the repetitive nature of our stride hitting the pavement with every single step we take.
What happens if our bodies aren’t in full alignment? Like if one side is stronger than the other. Or one of our legs rotates out while the other rotates in. Maybe one of our hips sits higher than the other side. With the countless different examples of this, we begin to put unnecessary stresses on the joints that could lead us to an injury.
When it comes to muscles, it also means that some muscle will have to work too much and others will begin to work too little. Again this could lead to an injury or us not running at our full potential that we desire to achieve our goals.
At acupuncture we do an assessment first to see how your body is literally stacking up so we can focus on you in the most optimal way with our sessions.
2. Speeding Up the Recovery Process
I always tell people acupuncture is the art of tricking the body to heal itself in faster way. The trick is achieved by using micro fine needles in strategic ways creating microtraumas underneath the skin. This may sound scary but it is actually pretty brilliant. Here’s how it works.
An acupuncture needle is 12 times thinner than a needle used to draw blood when you give blood or get a shot. So you could take 12 acupuncture needles and they’d all fit on top of a needle used at the doctor's office or hospital. They are super thin and cause minimal sensation when first inserted into the skin with the use of something we call a guide tube.
Regarding the microtrauma, this teeny tiny needle goes into the body and makes the body think there is something it needs to fix. What happens next is extra blood flow is sent to the area, antibodies are secreted, and hormones are released. All these things lead to faster recovery in precise areas where we put the needles.
3. Loosening Tight Muscles
Acupuncture can help loosen muscles in two different ways when it comes to training recovery. With ESTIM or with a muscle fasciculation.
ESTIM is like what physical therapists use with a TENS unit. A very small charge of stimulation is sent into the muscle through a clamp fastened to the needle. This stimulation can get a tight muscle to begin to contract and relax over and over again. It feels just like a heartbeat. By the muscle doing the back and forth contracting and relaxing the “tight give” on the muscle eventually lets go and the muscle stays relaxed. This happens really quickly within just a few minutes.
A muscle fasciculation occurs when a muscle is reset by a needle activating a muscle trigger point or motor point. A spasm will occur that gets the muscle to quickly contract and then relax. It’s very similar to what was described above with ESTIM except the muscle contracting and relaxing happens very quickly and only happens once and then it’s done. Same result. The muscle goes from being tighter to more relaxed.
The cool thing about this is how quickly and instantaneous this can occur. Most patients feel a change after having a session.
4. Activating Weaker Muscles
Sometimes we notice that one side of the body feels weaker than the other and we feel the solution is to strengthen the muscle. What if sometimes it’s not a matter of strengthening but is a matter of activating.
There’s a difference between a muscle being weak and a muscle acting weak because it’s not properly activating. Both will feel the same, like the muscle is not as strong as it should be. When a muscle isn’t activating it isn’t getting a full nerve signal from the brain to engage. It’s like having a car battery that is running low on juice and needs a jump.
Acupuncture can give your muscles a jump start to re-engage the nerve signal from the brain. Once the nerve signal is firing again the muscle that was weak becomes strong again. This is a more complicated topic that I’ll explain in more detail in a future post.
5. Finding and Clearing Myofascial Trigger Points
Trigger points are build ups that occur in muscles from repetitive muscle actions or from overuse. The trigger points form and can restrict movement making a muscle tight and can be responsible for pain felt in the body.
When an acupuncture needle touches the trigger point a fasciculation often occurs and the trigger points release, freeing up the muscle to move again. This is often referred to as dry needling in the physical therapy and western medicine world.
Would you like to give acupuncture a try for any or all of the above five things? Click here on this link to schedule an appointment. We’d love to see you at the clinic 😊