It is quite common to hear people use the phrase “I’ve pulled a muscle”. Now, the truth is that you can’t ‘pull’ a muscle, much less injure it that way. A pulled muscle is actually an injured or rather torn muscle or tendon. If not that what you have is a tight muscle, which happens when the muscle has been strained beyond its capacity and therefore has gotten inflamed and will hurt when you try to contract or expand it. This will give you a feeling of tightness. Most people will refer to these symptoms as a ‘pulled’ muscle.

Muscle tear or tightness usually occurs during exercise or any kind of physical activity beyond the muscles capacity. Generally, when you exercise muscles, a warm up is essential, and so is a gradual shift to doing strenuous exercises. When you ignore this, you push your muscles to doing things that they’re not yet capable of. The muscle fibers contract and expand beyond their capacity and develop small tears. Usually these tears will heal with a few days of rest and proper nutrition.

The bigger problem however starts when people continue to exercise a torn muscle with the same intensity. This exposes the muscle to more strain without any time for it to repair itself or to adjust to the additional strain. Thus the tear never heals but instead gets worse. In such a situation, most people will suffer from tendonitis or a tendon tear. Tendons are soft tissues that join muscles to bones. Tendon tear is worse because they take longer to heal than muscles and also because now along with muscles your bone movement to is restricted. Tendon tears are also very painful, producing sharp pain, swelling, numbness and inflammation at the ruptured joints.

This is the time to stop exercising and allow you body lots of food, water and rest along with ice packs, muscle relaxants and anti inflammatory tablets. At this point of time, if you continue training, the tendon will tear completely, restricting all your movements and at times even requiring surgery to get right. At this time it is also very important to remember that when one muscle is injured, the neighboring muscles are automatically over-taxed since they now have to support the injured muscle as well as put in extra effort to perform tasks that the injured muscle would have performed. Thus, if it’s a tendon connecting your deltoid to the humerus, you will eventually also experience pain or stiffness in your rotator cuff, neck muscles, and triceps. This is partly because of the stiffness that sets in when you don’t work a certain muscle group due to injury and partly because these muscles have now got to work extra hard.

Thus, it is important to understand exactly how to exercise and also to be able to read the signals your body gives you.