What Does a Flow Device Actually Do to Your Muscles?

When it comes to using your Flow device, it’s important that you have insight into how it can help you, what it’s doing to your body, and how it can support your recovery.

To understand this, we need to understand the structure of our muscles; on the surface, we have three layers of skin with a variety of functions, but they act as a ‘shell’ if you will for our body and keep everything inside.

When it comes to our ‘muscles’, we have three types; skeletal, cardiac, and smooth the one we are going to be focussing on is skeletal. Skeletal muscle is built up of an abundance of muscle fibres that are all intertwined through various tissues such as ‘fascia’, a form of connective tissue, nerve tissue, and capillaries that carry blood to and from the muscle via veins and arteries.

Without going too far into the physiology of a muscle, when you apply Percussion or Vibration therapy to the area, the point of contact of the heads creates a concave impact point which ‘ripples’ along the skin visually (imagine the sea and the waves).

Albeit that’s the impact on the surface, what’s essential for your recovery is what happens below.

When you work out, you may feel your muscles/ limbs feel heavy, cramped, tight, or achy, which is perfectly normal as the muscles have been depleted of their energy stores. What also happens, though, is there is a build-up of a byproduct called ‘lactic acid.’ Lactic acid is produced in your muscles and builds up during intense exercise. As a result, it can lead to painful, sore muscles.

Lactic acid buildup due to exercise is usually temporary and does not cause a lot of concern, but it can affect your workouts by causing discomfort.

Now you’re probably thinking, ‘lactic what?’ And ‘how does this affect me’ well, what we need to do with this lactic acid is get rid of it, our body does this naturally, but we can enhance it by using percussion & vibration therapy devices. The use of these devices increases blood flow, which increases the rate at which lactic acid is removed from our bodies.

When you apply percussion or vibration to a muscle, the impact of the attachment creates a ‘wave’ effect’ which ripples across the skin but, more importantly, stimulates the muscle below the skin. Increasing the demand for oxygen-rich blood to be circulated to the area also increases the speed at which lactic acid is removed.

Find out yourself; head on over to www.flowsportstech.com to help you find your flow.