Muscular Conditions
Dogs can suffer from various muscular injuries, which can affect their mobility and overall well-being. Common injuries such as strains, sprains, and trigger points, often result from overexertion, accidents, or sudden movements. These injuries can cause pain, swelling, and limited range of motion, making it essential for pet owners to recognise the signs and seek advice. Early intervention can help prevent further complications and ensure a speedy recovery for your your dog.
Strain
A muscle strain is an injury where muscle fibres are stretched beyond their normal limits or forced to contract too strongly, resulting in a stretch, tear, or even a complete rupture. A strain can range from a mild overstretching to a severe tear, depending on the number of fibres affected. Symptoms include pain, tenderness, muscle weakness, and sometimes bruising or swelling.
Sprain
A sprain is an injury to a ligament, which is a tough, band-like tissue that connects bones at a joint, caused by it being stretched too far or torn. Sprains occur when a joint is forced beyond its normal range of motion and are graded by severity, with symptoms including pain, tenderness, swelling, bruising, and sometimes joint instability. A common ligament injury in your dog is a CCL tear in their knee.
Trigger Points
These are hyper irritable taut bands of focal point tension. They are also known as muscle knots. They can cause reduced flexibility, chronic pain and poor range of movement. They are formed when a muscle is damaged through trauma, play fighting, overwork, repetitive motion and injury.
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There are many signs that your dog may have a trigger point these include ischemia, worsening of an orthopaedic issue, unwillingness to be touched, tickly spots, stiffness and reduced performance.
Myofascial Pain (MFP)
This is caused by the connective tissue known as fascia. Fascia envelopes around the entire body’s structures including bones, organs and muscles. It's function is to allow the structures it covers to slide and glide easily over each other and to aid in support.
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If damaged the fascia can constrict tightly around the muscle causing pain. It can also cause the muscle to become weak, fatigued, poor function, restricted range of movement, stiffness, tenderness, yelping when touched and tight twitchy skin.
Hypertonicity
Hypertonicity occurs when a muscle has too much resting tone. Hypertonic muscles can be short or long and will tend to cause deviations in normal posture. For example the dog may stand differently, drop their pelvis underneath them or alter their neck or tail carriage.
Hypertonic muscle will tend to be hard and inflexible to the touch which in turn decreases its ability to lengthen and contract efficiently and so inhibits normal movement. Hypertonic muscle can look as though it is bulging, feel hard and inflexible, produce a pain response and give off a dull nagging chronic pain