Immobilisation for soft tissue injuries. What is it doing?

Partial immobilisation and compression can be achieved with sports tape &/ elasticated bandages. These minimise movement and stress at the site of injury whilst still allowing blood flow and pain free movement.

The reason you need to minimise movement of an injured tissue in the first few days of an injury is to keep the size of the injury to an absolute minimum.

Movement and stress to the area at this point could cause even more retraction of the muscle fibres. This could lead to:

• a larger gap in the muscle

• longer healing time

• a larger haematoma (larger haematomas are a barrier to the healing tissue fibres)

Beyond the fist 1-3 days, pain free movement should be encouraged as this is associated with better muscle repair.

The following research was used to inform this blog post:

Peter Ueblacker, Lutz Haensel & Hans-Wilhelm Mueller-Wolfahrt (2016) Treatment of muscle injuries in football, Journal of Sports Sciences, 34:24, 2329-2337, DOI:10.1080/02640414.2016.1252849

This blog post is copyright of Holly Elliott registered osteopath trading as Helping Hands Health 15a Clayton Road, Jesmond, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE2 4RB.