Showing posts with label heat pack. Show all posts
Showing posts with label heat pack. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 5, 2013

How to relieve lower back pain fast and naturally

How to relieve lower back pain

Back pain relief - Back muscle pain relief

Most low back pain will get better with some activity. Avoid positions and activities that increase the pain, use ice and heat to help relieve the back pain. Once the back pain is gone there are several things that you can do to make sure that the pain does not come back or comes back less often, with good back pain management.

Sports Therapy wrap for back pain relief

 Muscle spasm in the lower back can create sensations that may range from mild discomfort to excruciating lower back pain. Heat therapy can help relieve  back pain and related tightness in the lower back. Sports Therapy wrap can be used for hot or cold therapy for all  back pain.

Why use heat for back pain relief..see here

 Many back pain problems result from strains and over-exertions, creating tension in the back muscles and soft tissues around the lower spine. As a result, this restricts proper circulation and sends pain signals to the brain.

For athletes or weekend warriors with sports injuries,pulled or aching muscles here is some information on the importance of keeping muscles warm before warm ups or stretches, the sports therapy wrap will help reduce the muscle injuries.

Recent studies have found that heat wrap therapy proved to be more effective
back pain relief than oral pain medications such as ibuprofen and acetaminophen.


Physiotherapy in sport

Heat packs are used in physiotherapy for sport injuries to decrease muscle spasms, which relax the muscles and allow for a deeper heat penetration into the muscle tissue. Heat therapy also allows for increased blood flow to an injured area, resulting in faster healing times and welcome muscle pain relief.

If you suffer from lower back pain,upper back pain,back pain muscle spasms or just plain back pain then the Sports Therapy wrap is the heat wrap you need to relieve your pain fast and naturally.

Monday, May 27, 2013

Heat packs and heat therapy

Heat Packs Therapy

What is heat therapy used for?

Heat packs can reduce muscle spasms, reduce joint stiffness, and make soft tissue more limber. Heat can be used to help loosen tight muscles and joints during a warm-up period before exercise. For example, you may put moist heat packs on tight leg muscles before running, or on your shoulder before throwing, or on tight neck or back muscles.
heat pack
Sports Therapy wrap heat pack

When should I use heat?

Use heat packs for stiff muscles and joints when you are trying to make them more limber. Do not use heat in the first few days after an injury or while your injury has any swelling because heat increases blood flow and can worsen swelling.

How should I use heat?

Moist heat is more effective than dry heat because it penetrates more deeply, which increases the effect on muscles, joints, and soft tissue. Use it for 15 to 20 minutes or longer if recommended by your health care provider.

Saturday, May 25, 2013

Heat packs for fast back pain relief

Heat packs

Back pain relief starts in just 3 minutes, that is how long it takes to warm the Sports Therapy Wrap .
Muscle pain management with the Sports Therapy wrap uses warm moist penetrating heat,
that relieves muscle aches and pains fast and naturally.
The heat wrap can also be used for cold therapy, pop it in the freezer for a couple of hours and it is ready to relieve fresh muscle injuries, I always have 2 heat wraps one that is always in the freezer and the other to pop in the microwave.
Fast back pain relief - Heat pack

What heat is for

Heat is primarily for muscle pain, and for stress relief. Warm Buddy heat packs and heat wraps offer a warm moist penetrating heat, that penetrate the muscle tissue and relieve aches and pains fast  and without the need of any over the counter pain medication.
The trick is knowing what muscle pain is. Muscle causes much more pain than most people are aware of. Some kinds of muscle pain are obvious enough — like the pain you get after the first ski trip of the season, or charlie horses in the night — but these are relatively isolated and obvious examples. Also, heat isn’t especially useful for them. Charlie horses are pretty fast, and for most people a rare problem, thankfully. And that post-exercise muscle soreness is virtually immune to any kind of therapy.
But muscle knots …
When you say that you have “knots in your muscles,” you are actually talking about trigger points. A trigger point is a small patch of contracted, stagnant, swampy muscle tissue. Instead of the whole muscle being in spasm, just a little piece of it is in spasm.
If you’d like to detour and learn much more about trigger points, see
Trigger Points & Myofascial Pain Syndrome: A guide to the science of muscle pain, with reviews of every possible self-treatment and therapy option, even for the most difficult cases.

Trigger points are likely to be the most common cause of undiagnosed and unexplained aches and pains, especially stubborn or recurrent headaches, neck cricks and backaches. It is a much more common cause of pain than the more widely reported repetitive strain injuries (RSIs), nerve pain, or herniated disks. Trigger points also complicate essentially all other injuries: they usually appear in response to other kinds of pain and dysfunction, and then often begin to overshadow the original problem.
And heat is a good therapy for trigger points.

What heat is not for

Never apply heat to a fresh injury! Really. Just don’t do it! That’s what icing is for. Ice is for injuries.
And what’s a “fresh” injury? Any time tissue has been physically damaged, it will be inflamed for a few days, give or take, depending on the seriousness of the injury. If superficial tissue is sensitive to touch, if the skin is hot and red, if there is swelling, these are all signs that your injury is still fresh, and should not be heated.
Here’s an example of what can happen when you heat an inflamed injury: When I was still in school, and my father had not yet learned to call me before asking a doctor about his aches and pains, he went to a drop-in clinic following a traumatic knee injury. The physician on duty prescribed heat! This is shockingly wrong, but the results spoke loud and clear: his knee swelled dramatically, outrageously, causing severe pain and immobility.
Bear in mind that heating is for muscle knots or trigger points and muscle spasm, but not for physically injured muscle — muscle strains, pulled muscles, torn muscles. Damaged muscle is usually inflamed, not in spasm, and trigger points are a minor factor in the aftermath of the injury. It’s usually obvious that you’ve torn muscle because there is always a very clear, nasty “oh shit” moment of trauma, where you know — instantly — that something has gone quite wrong.
However, you may be understandably confused about the difference between spasms, knots, tears, etc., especially if you have back pain, where it can and does sometimes get all mixed together. People routinely believe that their backs and necks are injured when in fact they are just suffering from trigger points. I have other articles devoted to clearing up this confusion.
If you think you have a muscle strain, but you’re not sure, a great article for helping you sort it out is Save Yourself from Muscle Strain!
If back pain is your issue and your not sure what’s causing it, get thee to Save Yourself from Low Back Pain!
And the article (Almost) Never Use Ice on Low Back Pain! is specifically devoted to helping people understand why heating back pain is almost always better than icing it.Heat therapy

How heat works

It’s not scientifically clear exactly why heat is such a treat. However, a good guess is that there are several minor positive effects that add up to … therapy. Most of these effects are also beneficial in other ways. Not incredibly beneficial, and not even notably different from icing: for instance, a 2010 study showed quite clearly that both ice packs and hot packs were beneficial for neck and back pain, and about equally so.1 But a small therapeutic effect is still valuable even if it’s small, and there are probably situations where it works even better — after all, these were people with acute pain bad enough that they went to the hospital. They may have been a bit beyond the help of a hot pack!
Trigger points are known to be aggravated by stress (“fight or flight” hormones and neurology). As long as we aren’t overheated to begin with, being warm is a pleasant and comforting sensation. Our comfort zone is a warm place. Heat almost always relaxes you overall.
Overall relaxation usually reduces resting muscle tone. You can have “tight” muscles without actually being in spasm. There are many degrees of increasing muscle tone between relaxed and “spasm.” A true muscle spasm is very strong and painful, like a charlie horse. But many people live in a state of near spasm — their muscles always clenched and exhausted. This state is both uncomfortable in itself, causing the same kind of muscle discomfort that you have when you are exhausted from exercise … but without the endorphins. And of course it also aggravates trigger points. So any reduction in muscle tone is quite helpful. And the reduction in stress hormones makes it a more therapeutic (lasting) effect, as opposed to just momentary symptom relief.
Our comfort zone is a warm place. Heat almost always relaxes you overall.
Although scientists don’t really understand the physiology of why trigger points come and go, they have certainly identified why they hurt — the stagnant, swampy tissue fluids inside a trigger point are a disgusting bath for nerve endings. Heat facilitates circulation somewhat, helping to wash away metabolic waste products, and bring fresh oxygen and nutrients to the area. No one knows how strong this effect is.
As with everything about trigger points, there are many (many) variables, and consequently it is very hard to study, and everyone gets different results. But heat seems to have enough relevant benefits that many people get at least temporary, partial relief from trigger point pain by heating. And some people find it downright curative.