In practice, it is very simple; one of our recovery specialists will have you sit comfortably in a way that lets them have easy access to your muscles. Then, they’ll use a percussion gun, holding it against your muscles while it both vibrates and jabs.
Although it’s very simple, it also has many benefits, so read on to find some of our favorites.
Preventing Stiffness
Muscle stiffness ranges from being a mild discomfort to being quite severe, and it most often starts within hours, or sometimes the next day, of a good workout. Fortunately, percussion therapy is perfect for preventing this. How?
Well, most of the stiffness that hits your muscles the next day is because your body wasn’t able to remove the waste, such as the lactic acid, your muscles made during your workout. When this sticks around in your muscles, it causes pain, soreness, and stiffness.
Percussion therapy helps your body remove this quickly, meaning you’ll hopefully have little to none of the stiffness and soreness later on.
Increased Blood Flow
Increasing the blood flow to your muscles does help with stiffness, but it also helps with other things. Recovering from an injury is one example of another reason why your muscles might need more blood going to them.
Though you shouldn’t use percussion therapy too close to an injured area, or you risk setting back your healing a bit, getting more circulation to the surrounding area will help speed up your recovery.
Mobility Assistance
There are two ways percussion therapy helps you have more mobility: reducing scarring and loosening tendons.
We at Recovery Lab know that scar tissue is sometimes more than painful; it can also limit your range of motion and flexibility, both of which are necessary to lower your chance of getting hurt again.
Our percussion therapy might not be able to completely get rid of scar tissue, but it is able to break up and soften some of it to let you move more freely.
As for loosening up your tendons, this is pretty straightforward and works in somewhat the same way light stretching does to warm them up enough for them to have more of their elasticity.
Lowered Stress
Think about sitting down in one of those massage chairs. Just the thought probably makes you think about relaxing, right?
Well, we know you can get some of this exact same effect from percussion therapy. In short, aside from removing stress in the form of tension from your muscles, it also removes some of your mental stress as well by making you feel more relaxed.
