Help Me Not Hurt When I Do This....

March 19, 2025 8:58 AM

While running errands this weekend, I twisted my left ankle and fell. However, when I was mid-fall I also tried to catch myself and pulled a couple extra muscles for good measure - a couple toes on the right foot, and also one of my pecs. The ankle and toes are recovering very nicely (I have twisted my ankle a lot and know the drill) but the pec isn't - because it gets more regular use. How can I give it a break and recover quicker?

To answer the obvious question - I am REALLY sure that this is a strained muscle and not a cracked rib. I checked that first and the symptoms don't match - it's a duller pulled-muscle kind of pain that is minor, and deep breathing didn't (and still doesn't) make it any better or worse. Also, when I do a gentle stretch that actually makes the chest injury feel good. Resting it would be the obvious treatment, but it's my right pec, and I'm right-handed - so things like lifting a quart of milk, pushing myself up from a desk, lying on my side, pulling a door open, or basically doing anything at all puts stress on it.

I'm wondering how to rest a muscle I literally need to use every day. Could I maybe wrap an ace bandage around my torso a couple days to give it extra support? Or is there some other "this muscle needs rest but it literally can't rest" step I could take?....

Again - fortunately - this is only about 3 days ago and the pain is extremely minor.

posted by EmpressCallipygos to Health & Fitness (8 answers total)

Best answer: I would say sling that arm as much as humanly possible, in part so the sling forces you to do most of the little things with your left - you can lift milk and open doors with that one, if awkwardly.

Anti-inflammatories on a regular schedule for 2-3 days, to get the swelling down and staying down. Do continue your careful stretching but make sure you're fully-ibuprofened when you do them.

I am a huge fan of good-quality CBD topical for soft-tissue damage.
posted by Lyn Never at 9:10 AM on March 19 [3 favorites]

I fell down Sunday night. Knocked myself out for an hour or so. Blood swatches all over the bathroom where I wiped out. Which their positions I can't make sense of.

As I have been trying to clue it together, given no memories of any of it...

I assume I tried to catch my fall, (failed, given my head wounds), and my pecs have just felt worse and worse the last couple of days. Just, don't stress those. Healing doesn't happen right away, All my ancillary parts have just been hurting more and more, but they will be fine, eventually, I hope.

Wait a while. See if they are following the normal healing stuff. Takes a while for the damage to manifest. Don't go to the gym for shoulders day. My damage just moved from the pecs by my shoulders, to my ribcage area. I am a fan of waiting these kinds of pains out, We all take time to heal...
posted by Windopaene at 8:54 PM on March 19

Comment: I don't go to doctors or the ER unless I have to. A problem. But YMMV.
posted by Windopaene at 9:05 PM on March 19

Response by poster: I already suspect I should probably be taking more NSAIDs than I have been - I have a bad habit of not taking enough of those because I think I should just "tough it out". My doctor once had to literally write me a prescription for OTC Advil as a reminder that I should take more than just one in the morning when I was getting over a similar issue.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:59 AM on March 20

I don't like taking painkillers for muscle injuries because in my experience their main effect is to make inadvertent re-injury much more likely, thereby slowing down the recovery process. So I'm seconding slinging, not so much to take load off the injury as to serve as a speedbump against exactly that kind of carelessness. That said, I've found both naproxen and diclofenac to be useful for injuries that nag me harder than I need them to. I would never take those together, nor would I combine them with other NSAIDs such as aspirin or ibuprofen.

The other thing I like to do for muscle injuries is to make time, several times per day, just to sit with them for a few minutes with my hand resting gently on the place where the pain is worst. Generally, after a minute or two I'll find that without even having started with any intent to, my fingers are delivering a super gentle massage that slows my breathing, slows my heart rate and leaves the injured part feeling comforted and cared for. I rationalize this as helping move the metabolic by-products of tissue reconstruction away from the injury zone, but really the main reason I do it is because it feels nice.

It took years for me to break the customary "don't be a sook" Puritan conditioning enough to accept that healing is allowed to involve simple, gentle forms of self-care that feel pleasurable, that pleasurable sensations are quite a reliable guide to appropriateness and efficacy especially when caring for muscle injury because why the hell wouldn't they be, and that "I don't have time for that" is almost always just so much self-punishing horseshit.
posted by flabdablet at 8:33 PM on March 20

Also yes to cannabis being my muscles' best friend. Really useful adjunct to stretching, especially of muscles I would much rather didn't get injured.
posted by flabdablet at 8:37 PM on March 20

Response by poster: I think the NSAIDS did the trick. I started taking it on a regular schedule Friday and kept up with that schedule all weekend; I also was careful not to overexert that shoulder. And today it is MUCH much better.

Thanks!
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:11 AM on March 24

Keep it moving, but only in gentle ways that at most induce it to grumble a bit rather than actually yelling at you, and full recovery should be pretty rapid.
posted by flabdablet at 11:37 AM on March 24