This week I tried dry needling. The past few months I’ve struggled with tendonitis in my posterior tibialis (inside of my ankle) and my physical therapist suggested dry needling my calf. Pretty much, what dry needling does is stimulate the muscle so that it completely loosens up instead of being tight. It’s ideal for the muscle to be sort of in the middle between super tight and super loose. You can stretch your muscle and roll it out a bunch to get it from tight to the middle point, but it’s easiest to dry needle and get it super loose and then work the muscle to that middle point.
I left school early, which was pretty much the only nice part of this whole experience, and went to my physical therapist’s. She had me lie down, and then cleaned off my calf and stuck a tiny needle in it after looking for the tightest spot. The actual needle didn’t hurt at all, but then she started moving it around looking for a trigger point, and it felt like my calf had a giant charlie horse that was tightening and untightening. Once the pain stopped and my muscle stopped twitching she would take it out and put a different one in. This all sounds super unpleasant and that’s because it was. The whole time she was really nice and was asking if I was okay. I suffered through it cause I payed money and also because after dealing with my tendonitis for so long I was willing to try anything (I’ve done cupping and shock therapy as well). She did the same thing with 5 more needles and then I did some band exercises to retrain my muscle. When I got off the table I could barely walk because my calf was so sore and had to hobble around for the rest of the day.
This experience was really helpful in the long run because it relieved a lot of the pressure on my tendon, though I would not recommend this for people who have a really low pain threshold, or people who weren’t recommended to do this by a physical therapist.
That’s all for this week’s thing