Moist Heat or Dry Heat for Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness - PMC
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Since strength was reduced when heat was applied at 24 hours, there was damage to the muscle fibers unresolved by heat. But since elasticity was maintained if heat was applied at 24 hours, then a logical conclusion is that heat after 24 hours allowed the healing of tendon and connective tissue so that elasticity was retained but did not help the muscle fibers themselves. This is also shown in the skin resistance data. Here moist heat immediately after exercise was just as effective as dry heat applied immediately and 1 day post exercise. But for pain, moist heat immediately after exercise was more effective than dry heat just after exercise. If either modality was applied 24 hours post exercise, the effects were minimal on pain.The greater preservation of strength with heat is probably related to increased blood flow in deep tissues [37]. This would increase metabolism and wash away metabolic products that would increase damage to the tissues. Metabolism in tissue doubles for every 2 degree centigrade increase in tissue temperature, allowing for greater healing [37]. Normal shell tissues such as the quadriceps are as much as 5 degrees C less than core temperature [38, 39]. Thus increasing temperature would as much as quadruple metabolism. It is normal for muscle blood flow to increase after exercise due to inflammation and injury [34, 40] such as with delayed onset muscle soreness. But the slow application of heat should cause blood flow to stay elevated to a much higher level and for a longer period of time and allow for better healing of the tissues damaged by DOMS. Pain relief was also seen with moist and dry heat. This is probably due to both faster healing and also gating of pain by skin temperature sensitive ion channels blocking deep pain.
The results of these experiments then show that in spite of the fact that moist heat was only applied for ¼ the duration of dry heat, it was just as effective if not more effective in reducing pain and muscle damage after exercise.
Dry heat, moist heat and body fat: are heating modalities really effective in people who are overweight? - PubMed
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Subcutaneous fat above the quadriceps muscle varied from 0.51 to 0.86 cm of thickness. Three heating modalities were examined: the application of dry heat with a commercial chemical heat pack, hydrocollator heat packs (providing a type of moist heat), and a whirlpool, where conductive heat loss through water contact would be very high. The temperature of the skin and the temperature in the muscle (25 mm below the skin surface) were assessed by thermocouples. The results of the experiments showed that for heating modalities that are maintained in skin contact for long periods of time, such as dry heat packs (in place for 6 hours), subcutaneous fat did not impair the change in deep muscle temperature. In contrast, when rapid heat modalities were used, such as the hydrocollator and the whirlpool (15 minutes of sustained skin contact), the transfer of heat from the skin to deep muscle was significantly impaired in people with thicker subcutaneous fat layers. We observed that the greater the impairment in heat transfer to muscle from skin covered by body fat, the warmer the skin temperature increase during the modality.
Heat transfer to deep tissue: the effect of body fat and heating modality - PubMed
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The muscle temperature after immersion in water approached that of the packs within approximately 20 minutes. In contrast, when hot and cold packs were used with various thickness of towels ranging from 2 to 10 mm in thickness, the change in muscle temperature was much less and it was still changing at the end of a 20 minute period.
Use your heat packs if you want, at this point it’s pretty clear to me that hands warmers (if used for hours), and moist heat (used long enough as well, 15-20 minutes? insulating cups, washcloth? think about testicles too!) are the way to go to warm up. Also either ?ll do a very thorough warm up to actually heat the tissues, or I won’t be bothered, the in between is useless. Afaik cheap incandescent bulbs just emit a light that heats the surface, the studies on penetrative infrared light corresponded to 830 nm of wavelength, which does not produce heat but should increase energy production inside the tissues. I’m curious about steaming the penis (think mem’s warm up), I don’t know if it’s more effective than moist heat, by feel I’d say it’s possible.
Here is all I could find on steaming lol:
The Right Steam Does The Right Thing | Tuttnauer
Firstly during sterilization, the wetness in the steam clogs the pores of packed loads and prevents the steam from properly penetrating wrapped loads or sealed pouches. The wetness prevents the steam from penetrating the load.
I’d like to find their results but have not: https://www.biw .kuleuven.be/m2 … 17-final-report