If you suffer an injury to a joint or soft tissue, your body oftentimes works to naturally protect the area through a process known as muscle guarding. When your brain interprets new or worsening pain signals in an area, it can send signals to muscles in the area to involuntarily contract in order to limit movement and protect the area from further stress. It is a protective mechanism that tries to keep additional strain off the area, much like a cast would do for a patient suffering from a broken foot.
And while muscle guarding can be helpful in the short-term, prolonged muscle guarding can lead to additional issues and make it harder for you to break out of the pain cycle. In today’s blog, we explain why muscle guarding can be helpful and how to ensure it doesn’t end up causing problems for your body as you work to recover after an injury.
The Benefits Of Muscle Guarding
We already touched on the main benefit of muscle guarding in the introduction, and that’s to help protect an injured area from additional stress. The injured area is likely weakened after an injury, so even a normal amount of stress could do more damage to an area. Involuntary contraction of the surrounding muscles will help to limit movement and strain on the area, offering some additional protection to an area as it works its way through the healing process.
The Potential Drawbacks Of Muscle Guarding
In the short-term, muscle guarding can be protective and beneficial, but it can lead to some related issues if the process goes unchecked. For example, if muscle guarding is in effect for an extended period of time, you may end up losing flexibility and normal range of motion in an area due to tissue atrophy. If you aren’t gradually working to strengthen and maintain flexibility in soft tissues, they may end up deconditioning.
Deconditioned muscles can beckon even more problems. If any area remains weak even after the original injury is no longer producing symptoms, your body may naturally shift how stress is channeled through an area, which in turn puts more stress on different areas of your body. For example, let’s say you injured your left knee, and you were overly protective of the area during your recovery period. Even though your left knee no longer hurts, the supportive muscles and soft tissues in the area have been weakened as a result of prolonged muscle guarding. Not only does this increase their risk of injury if they are overly stressed, but it also means that other areas, like your right knee or hip, are likely handling additional strain during normal movements to pick up the slack for your left knee.
When other areas have to handle more stress because another area has been deconditioned, they can end up deteriorating at a faster rate. It would not be surprising if the person in this scenario ended up dealing with joint degeneration in their right hip or knee because these areas had to regularly handle more stress due to the muscle deconditioning and muscle guarding that took place as a result of the original injury to the left knee.
So how can you work to prevent prolonged muscle guarding after a new injury? It should come as no surprise that physical therapy is the single best way to prevent extended muscle guarding in the wake of an injury. At its very core, physical therapy is designed to gradually reintroduce different structures to new motions and stress patterns. When performed with professional oversight, you can strengthen, stabilize and remobilize these muscle groups that have become deconditioned as they worked to protect a specific area of your body. This helps you get back to a pre-injury level of strength and ensures that other areas aren’t forced to pick up the slack for an extended period of time. We’ll help you regain mobility, flexibility and function in your injured area and the associated muscle groups through a targeted physical therapy plan.
Your body wants to protect itself after an injury, but this protective process can actually be detrimental to full recovery if it goes on for too long. Let our team help reintroduce these protective muscles to healthy amounts of stress so that they can get back to functioning optimally. For more information about muscle guarding or the injury recovery process, reach out to the team at OrthoRehab Specialists today at (612) 339-2041.
PT of Costa Rican National Soccer Team for 2007 World Cup in Victoria, CAN. Clinical Instructor for University of Minnesota Doctor of Physical Therapy Affiliations
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