How To Treat A Pulled Muscle

Hi. My name's Nick Mitchell. I'm the owner of Ultimate Performance Personal Training here in London.

Today, we're going to talk about how to build muscle. We're going to look at various different topics and cover everything that we can to help get you the muscle mass, the muscle development that you want and to give you all the little tricks of the trade that help makes this personal training business here the best in the business. Okay, today we're going to talk about how to treat pulled muscles.

Now, if you feel that you've pulled a muscle, you've got to sort of identify the severity of that pull. If you can still move it and the muscle moving around the joint is okay is everything, perhaps you can diagnose and self-treat. But if it's something that's quite severe, if it's something that's causing you a lot of joint pain or something like that, you must go seek medical advice.

So, that's the first thing that I will tell you. But in terms of treating a pulled muscle generally, whether you seek medical advice or not, the first things that you need to do, you need to follow this, there's an acronym you need to follow, it's called RICE, it's been around for forever. RICE stands for R-I-C-E, rest, ice, compression, elevation.

So as soon as you pulled a muscle, you must rest it. You don't carry on training. No, I'm a big proponent of no pain, no gain.

No pain, no gain, does work. But it's no good pain, no gain, no bad pain. You must learn to distinguish between bad pain and good pain.

Muscles burning is not the same as a pulled muscle. If you feel you've pulled a muscle, stop. Stop training, you stop running, you stop lifting, you stop doing whatever it is you're doing, you rest.

You try to get some cold on to the muscle, some ice. Don't put ice directly on to the muscle, wrap a nice pack of something like a tea towel, apply it to the muscle. Compression, you will have a bit of compression, maybe it's a bandage holding the ice on to the muscles, say you put them in your shoulder.

Again, what this is will do is this will help, the cold will help basically the blood flow deep into the muscle tissue to take away any inflammation and things like that and taking away the inflammation accelerates the healing process. And then what you must do, you must elevate it, again this will take away the inflammation. So if you've hurt your leg, you elevate your leg.

If you've hurt your arm, you try to keep your arm high and relatively immobilized. All of these things will speed up the healing process and prevent the inflammation that can ultimately lead to the build-up of adhesions within the muscle that can ultimately lead to tightness of the muscle that can then cause a reoccurrence to a greater severity of the original pulled muscle. So, these are the things you must do.

Pull a muscle, R-I-C-E, RICE, rest, ice, compression, elevation. It's been with us for ages and why it's ages because it works and it works very very well indeed.