Do you get that throbbing feeling in your hands when you’re just sitting at your desk? Because you most likely have been doing repetitive motions all day long, and injuring yourself potentially without even realizing it. And this is what repetitive injuries are. And they can be really painful. Watch the full video to discover everything you need to know about repetitive strain injury and how you can stop it:
What is a Repetitive Strain Injury?
A repetitive injury is an injury that happens from repetitive motions. When you perform a motion over and over and over again, the muscles, the tendons, and the ligaments will stretch.
And over time, that stretching can create internal problems in that soft tissue. Imagine a rubber band when you stretch it over and over again. And eventually, it just doesn’t rebound anymore. The repetitive stress can create permanent problems in your body, and that’s why it’s important to understand them. (Check out Signs and Symptoms of Repetitive Strain Injury.)
Common Repetitive Strain Injuries
Carpal tunnel syndrome. It’s a common injury that happens to people who type all day or do other activities with their hands. It’s where they do the same motion over and over again, without giving the body enough time to recover in between those movements. This will cause inflammation. And that’ll cause pain, numbness, tingling, and a loss of sensation.
Tennis elbow syndrome. You perform repetitive motion when you’re gripping that tennis racket all day long. It also causes inflammation, which can cause pain, numbness, tingling, and a loss of sensation in your arm.
But tennis elbow doesn’t always come from playing tennis. In fact, it can come from activities like weightlifting, typing, or even just using your phone.
Bursitis. Our joints have this fluid-filled SAC called Bercept. It surrounds our joints and help with flexibility.
When that SAC gets inflamed or injured, it can cause a lot of pain in the area, as well as swelling. We can get bursitis in our shoulder, hips, elbow, and other parts of the body. These repetitive injuries typically happen because your body has worked too hard to do the same motion over and over again, without giving the body time to recover.
Repetitive strain injuries can happen from any repetitive activity. Like golf, tennis, driving, sitting at a computer, and more.
What can you do when it happens?
- Find the activity that’s causing the injury and try to do something else. When you play tennis, you could try swimming from time to time. You could change your hand position while typing. And so on. Basically, what we want to do is reduce the amount of time performing the activity that causes the problem.
- Do some gentle stretches before and after performing that repetitive motion. So that it’s less stressful on the body, but you can still get it done.
The most important thing at this point is just remembering repetition. If you’re doing it over and over again, you’re going to have a problem. And hopefully, this understanding will help you to prevent these problems in the future.
See also: Relieve neck tension with these 3 exercises.
Check out this article: Symptoms of Repetitive Strain Injury
