Walking in my shoes within four weeks

Hi all,

I just ran across something really interesting. There is a rat model of muscle atrophy where the back legs are kept off the ground. It is primarily used to study the effects of weightlessness in space. Like after Achilles surgery, the calf muscles atrophy a lot after 14 days of no use in this rat model. In a study of these rats, vibration was applied to the Achilles tendon, while it was being stretched, for just 3-4 minutes a day, and the muscle atrophy was a great deal less.

http://jap.physiology.org/cgi/content/abstract/87/1/3
(The Journal of Applied Physiology is an excellent journal, by the way; no crackpot science there.)

This is especially interesting to me because I used a vibrating massager on my calf rather often during my first few weeks postop. I don’t recall if I was ever stretching as I did it, but I’m sure I averaged well over 3-4 minutes a day of vibration applied. I wasn’t looking for any effect on atrophy, it just felt good, but I wonder if it was an unintentional but important piece of my rather fast recovery.

Doug

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