Video: How Muscles Build & Heal

This Season: Tailgating; New Year, New You; Tax Time

Muscle healing uses white blood cells to create a barrier around damaged muscle tissue and repair it after a strenuous workout. Understand how the muscles in the body build back up and heal after strenuous workouts over time with tips from an experienced medical professional in this free video.

Video Transcript

O.k. So we talked about how as there's micro tears occurring in the muscles when you exercise. And this is a simple example of muscle cells stacked on top of each other. That's actually the anatomy of how muscle cells create muscle tissue. And these are clean muscles and these are the exercise muscles that need to be repaired. So how this process works is a key point to how exercise is actually affective and helpful for countering the aging process. And to give a little demonstration, I'm going to be using food color and this water in the glass here to kind of show how this works. But, basically, every time those tears occur, white blood cells swarm to the area kind of like a bee swarming a damaged nest. And they swarm to that area to create, to wall off the area, and repair the damaged tissues. So if this dye then is the inflammatory cascade or the chemical messenger that occurs when the damage to the muscle cells happens, this is the blood. So we can think of once the tissue is torn, it's an instantaneous affect where the tissue creates a chemical messenger to white blood cells to swarm to the area to repair the damage. And it is instantaneous which the reason for using this is. You can see how it spreads out to the area. That instant when it hits the water, it spreads out. And so how this relates to the aging process and what's important about it will be the subject of the next video.

Follow eHow: Follow @eHow

How Muscles Build & Heal

Related Ads

Related Articles & Videos