Working with so many patients over the years allows one a chance to observe different types of patients. One of the things this has highlighted for me is that more often than not people whose jobs involve exercise tend to have less painful muscles that respond sooner to remedial treatments than sedentary people. Sedentary people still respond, just less rapidly.

Of course, exercise is one of many factors influencing response rate. Mental stress, or poor diet or drugs can alter tissue response rate, as can excessive-exercise or relative over-exercise for people with poor fitness levels, all leading to poorer recovery. Nevertheless, sedentary people often respond a little more slowly. Why? One reason is tissue detox efficiency via lymphatics.

Lymph vessels help remove tissue waste products via the liver & kidneys. However, they don’t have a heart to pump lymphatic fluid. Rather they rely on tiny muscles surrounding each lymph vessel which all contract in a coordinated way to pump lymph, and then on skeletal-muscle contractions from exercise to super-boosts lymph flow. Being sedentary (low muscular activity) much reduces flow.

For example, at rest, 2/3 of leg lymph-flow comes from smooth-muscles lining lymph vessels, just 1/3 comes from incidental leg-muscle contractions.

Studies show that a person when:

• asleep, has very low ankle lymph flow, just 0.24 ml/hour.
• standing increases ankle lymph flow 13 times.
• fast walking, increases ankle lymph flow 15 times

Contracting skeletal muscles (exercises) support tissue cleansing by pumping toxin laden lymph, newly made by tissue cells, along the lymphatic vessels and away from the tissues. People who don’t exercise regularly still produce a reasonable amount of metabolic tissue waste but don’t have the benefit of the wonderful flushing effects that continual muscle contraction and relaxation provides. So, their tissues tend to have much poorer waste & toxin removal. Many of these waste products irritate muscle and its nerve cells producing pain signals, sometimes even to light touch. This should make it easy to see why muscles with reduced daily waste & toxin removal may feel much more painful and have more trouble healing.