Aches and Pains Avoided

Sonja Freiermuth recalls a time during last year’s softball season when at least three players, including herself, were nursing strained quad muscles.

The 43-year-old competitive softball player and fitness instructor at Northfield Athletic Club said that all it took for her to pull her quad was making a quick move while playing shortstop for her College City Beverage team in one of the first games of the season.

“I stepped and all of the sudden I felt a lot of pain,” said Freiermuth, who had the dubious honor of starting the spate of injuries on her team last season. “I pulled my quad so badly, I felt like I was going to pass out.”

Freiermuth said that the string of pulled muscles has continued this season as a couple of the players have tweaked quad muscles or hamstrings. She said the pitcher on her team, Sheila Stalberger, pulled her quad so badly earlier this season that she had to seek medical attention and was forced to take two weeks off.

“You can see that she still has to wrap it and stretch it before each game,” Freiermuth said. “I just think once it happens, you can strain it much easier. And it’s been my experience that it takes a little longer to heal as we get older.”

Women are susceptible

Whether you’re an elite athlete, a weekend warrior, or a busy mom who twists her ankle moving the groceries from the car, you may be susceptible to muscle strain.

Like the common cold, it’s an equal opportunity ailment that can visit anyone anytime, whether you’re doing too much too fast, or too little over a long period of time.

The remedy, too — Rest, Ice, Compression, and Elevation (RICE) — is almost as familiar as the rest and fluids prescribed for respiratory infection. And like the common cold, there is no cure. Complete recovery is possible, but entirely up to the patient’s willingness to work for it.

Muscle strain, often referred to as a “pulled muscle,” is a tearing of the muscle fibers and the tendons attached to the muscle. This can also damage small blood vessels, causing local bleeding (bruising) and pain caused by irritation of the nerve endings in the area. There are three levels or grades of severity, ranging from mild to moderate to severe.

“We see some grade I (mild) injuries, but mostly we deal with grade II and III injuries, which are debilitating enough for patients to seek medical care,” said Josh Berndt, a physical therapist at the Waseca Medical Center. “The most severe musculotendinous injuries will require a consultation by an orthopedic surgeon followed by PT.”

Waseca Medical Center’s modern facility has cutting-edge, technology-based modalities such as electrical stimulation and ultrasound to treat acute pain, but these are only to smooth the way for rehabilitative exercise.

“The only way to recover is first to rest from the stressful activity for several days to control inflammation, then by stretching and strengthening the injured muscle,” Berndt said.

The most frequent injuries, Berndt said, are shoulder, knee and forearm injuries, usually caused by accidents or overuse.

“People referred with upper extremity muscle strains are usually manual laborers or athletes injured while participating in sports like baseball, softball, golf, or tennis,” Berndt said. “Many people get hurt by overdoing it. Typically, they’re trying to push the body faster or farther than it can go. This can happen either one time lifting too much, or lifting a smaller amount for too long.

“Muscle strains can also be caused by trauma. This occurs when an outside force applied to the body is greater than the muscle can withstand." Though it is sometimes daunting for a patient in pain to face a lengthy regimen of stretching, Berndt emphasizes that it is necessary to prevent further injury.

“Severe strains involve bleeding, which can create scar tissue,” he explains. “Stretching and strengthening exercises are imperative to ensure complete rehabilitation of the injured muscle and to return the individual to their previous level of function at work or in leisure activities.”

Not everyone, however, heeds this advice.

Where East meets West

Fortunately, advances in the various fields of energetic medicine can supplement traditional medicine’s methods of care: they emphasize body awareness, mindful movement, balance and self-knowledge.

Energetic health practitioners have dispensed with the idea that the body is a machine with parts that wear down, to be braced by drugs or replaced by surgery. Instead, they treat the whole person as an intelligently inter-connected continuum of energy systems that will bend toward health and wellness if not interfered with. Often, a blend of Eastern healing traditions and Western technological advances and energetic practices offer an integrative approach to wellness, not merely the absence of disease.

Yoga

“The best definition of yoga is ‘mindful movement with breath,’” said Daisy Christopherson, physical therapist who uses yoga to help prevent the athletic injuries she so often treats at Northfield Physical Therapy.

It also is the best antidote to muscle strain, adds Amy Etzell, owner/director and teacher at Heartwork Yoga Studio in Northfield.

“Yoga helps prevent muscle strain by slowly bringing heat into the muscle and gently opening it to increase its range of motion,” Etzell said. “We see many athletes who are well-trained in their sport start practicing yoga because they were always getting injured.”

She knows, because she was one. In her 20s, Etzell was a weightlifter and marathon runner.

“I noticed that the combination of running and having children seemed to make my muscles tighter and tighter,” she said. “By the time I turned 30, my hips were so tight and inflexible that I would sit on the floor with my kids and my hips would lock up.”

Etzell, the mother of four, had chronically strained hamstrings, persistent lower back pain, and “was always nursing an injury.”

“Then my doctor told me that I should try yoga to increase my flexibility,” she said. “I began yoga and in a few months my back didn’t hurt anymore, and I have not had a pulled muscle in 10 years. My running times got better because running took far less effort, and I feel fit and energetic even in my mid-40s.”

Christopherson says she sees too many athletes willing to work hard and bear pain; she educates them to work smart and feel good.

“This is the hardest habit to break people of, and accounts for a lot of injuries,” she said. “People want to keep doing hard, mindless, repetitive stuff, thinking there is some virtue in pain and boredom.”

Christopherson has many examples of this.

“Lots of quad injuries happen because people think they’re stretching when they grab their foot to their rear, thinking ‘I gotta do this before I run,’” she said. “They should be thinking, ‘Where is my body tight today, and what does it need me to do for it?"

The Northfield physical therapist believes people have to learn to take more responsibility for their bodies.
“They don’t attend to its needs and then they come in, injured and shocked that ‘my body did this to me,’” she said. “It had probably been warning you for awhile, but you weren’t listening.”

Christopherson uses anatomy texts to show patients how their muscles and joints work, and uses yoga to “offer new dimensions of understanding of their own bodies and their capabilities that keeps them engaged and challenged.”

It also builds core strength and flexibility, “which are what many athletes lack who think they are fit and strong,” she says, adding that many clients find their athletic pursuits reinvigorated “when they get the body, mind and spirit back together” with yoga.

Acupuncture

The 5,000-year-old Chinese art of acupuncture offers another drug-free route to healing and pain relief of muscle strain. Acupuncture involves the insertion of extremely fine needles into locations on the skin along channels called meridians, which practitioners believe regulates the movement of the body’s ch’i, or life force. Once considered arcane and esoteric, the treatment has become so mainstream that it is even covered by most insurance at many hospitals and clinics in southern Minnesota, such as the Allina Clinic system.

“Pain is a lack of free flow in the body,” said Jenny Gamer, who is certified in Chinese medicine and acupuncture. Her practice, “Pivotal Point Oriental Medicine” in Northfield, offers both acupuncture and massage therapy, which is also useful in easing strains.

“Both ch’i and blood normally flow through the tissues,” Gamer said. “An external injury cuts off this free flow. You get an immediate buildup of heat, which is good, as this is the body’s attempt to heal itself, just like getting a fever when you have an infection. Problems happen when there is too much blood and heat: the flow is constricted.”

Acupuncture works by drawing the excess fluid away from the injury, she said.

“It re-establishes the flow and restores balance to the site and to the body,” Gamer said. “If someone is not healing within a reasonable time, it means their body is not supporting healing. The condition has become chronic, so the need is now to look not at the injury, but to the person’s overall health to see why it’s not supporting healing. Chinese medicine seeks patterns of disharmony rather than discrete symptoms, as does Western medicine.”

Healing Touch

Sherri Quaas, a certified Healing Touch practitioner for eight years, believes that Healing Touch can dramatically speed recovery.

“I’ve had many clients come in who have had an injury that was treated by a doctor or physical therapist and they are amazed at how much faster they heal than what the doctor told them,” she said. “They have less need for medications, their quality of life is enhanced and their energy is increased.”

Quaas said research has shown that the technique can reduce recovery time by more than half.

Healing Touch works on the principle that there are energy systems both in and around the body, which must be free-flowing for optimal health. The trauma of an injury causes blockages in this flow; the trauma is trapped in this energetic body, which slows healing in the physical body. Healing Touch, which uses a light touch on or over the body, eases this congestion and helps restore and balance energy that has been depleted due to injury or stress.

Quaas has used the technique to assist post surgical patients at Northfield Hospital.

“That is why they get people up and walking around so soon after surgery,” she said. “The faster you speed the healing the better, because the longer the body is in the ‘disease’ mode, the longer it stays there.”

The advantages of Healing Touch, according to Quaas, are that a 15- to 60-minute session can provide immediate relief of acute or chronic pain, ease anxiety or depression, can be done anywhere, and costs about the same as massage therapy.

Once thought of as a peripheral “alternative,” modality, Healing Touch therapy is moving into the mainstream; there are many practitioners in the I-35 corridor, both individual and clinic-affiliated.

Help is available for muscle strain, but recovery rests with the individual.

“We can bump up the healing process,” said physical therapist Christopherson, “but the fact that you got injured means that you need to change something. You have to be a partner in your own healing.”

— Associate Editor Jerry Smith contributed to this story.