Regular exercise helps overcome unnecessary injuries

Dr Joseph Kamugisha Sometimes people tend to fill muscle fatigue and sometimes injuries after weekly sports exercise on Friday. The muscle fatigue or pain is often caused by poor stretching mechanism or inadequate activity of major muscles. People tend to feel pain especially in joints after exercise. The commonest sites include the knee joint, Achilles and wrist joint. Now when one complains about the joints, the best is to evaluate the muscles attached to the tendons or muscle fibers that connect muscles and joints. In case of ankle joint pain or Achilles tendonitis, you can test the calf muscles such as the gastrocnemius and soleus for length and presence of adhesions. In case of the wrist pain, you can check the forearm flexors and extensors closer to their origin near the elbow joint. Most professional sportsmen do suffer similar injuries when a muscle group is chronically tight due to overuse. Warm-ups before competitive games are necessary to ensure adequate stretch. Lack of stretching impedes blood flow to the tendons, which makes these tendons highly susceptible to injury from accumulation of waste products and workload from everyday activities. If you look at a cross section of a large muscle group, you realise three different layers of connective tissue that compartmentalise individual muscle fibers and groups of muscle fibers. Tendons are very important when it comes to stretching or exercise. They can withstand pressure exerted by the muscle and the bones. The tendon is comprised of three layers; the epimysium, perimysium, and endomysium that come together to form a tendon. Out toward the end of each muscle group, the muscle tissue diminishes. The connective tissue layers that form a tendon are adjacent to large amounts of muscle tissue around the middle of a large muscle group. They are always well perfused with blood as muscle tissue is highly vascularised by blood vessels that run in between bundles of muscle fascicles where as the outward part of the tendons where tissue muscle disappears, there are fewer blood vessels. When muscles are tight, then less blood travels through the vessels that run in between muscle fascicles, which means less overall blood supply for tendons and thus susceptible to wear and tear. In order to keep your joints fit and healthy, you need regular stretching. Regular stretching usually forms effective therapies to prevent muscles from shortening over time, which helps keep tendons healthy with adequate blood supply. Regular exercise will keep the tendons around joints like your wrists, ankles, knees, and hips to stay healthy and therefore muscles around cannot become chronically tight. However, people with vitamin D deficiency do usually experience regular sprains and strains even with adequate stretch mechanism. Lack of vitamin D is a common cause of poor connective tissue health and often an underlying root cause of aches and pains associated with fibromyalgia. There can be other causes of pain based on the site or activity but the physical approach of our body is the one already discussed. Physiotherapists usually help to identify the root causes of pain. Dr Joseph Kamugisha is an oncologist at Rwanda Military Hospital, Kanombe

Health

Regular exercise helps overcome unnecessary injuries