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Trade Show aching legs and Accidental Athlete’s leg health2009 Copyright Michael Gillan 1http://aching-legs.org/exhibitor_stand_leg_relief.html
The Exhibition or Trade Show StandDo It Yourself Recovery System
When I was a trainee masseur, the massage school I attended used to encourage to us work atexhibitions or trade shows to put the idea out to the public of some of the benefits of massage and togive us contact with new people to learn people skillsWe discovered that many of the people who turned up to the stands were those who actually workedon other stands and they felt so stressed after a long time standing and walking on their stand floor.Unfortunately, the only thing we could offer them was a seated upper body and neck and shouldermassage because we were not equipped to do the lower part of the body where they actually werehaving problems-the legs
Doing a multi-day trade show is exhausting work
It is during the multi-day trade shows that the fitness and recovery or the lack of it that fatigue takesits toll on the body-not only is there mental fatigue through dealing so many would be clients, thelegs do not recover very well from the previous day of standing and walkingThe consecutive days put the trade show stand person in the ranks of the endurance athlete, even if they are there accidentally and they can suffer some of the consequences of doing this in the longterm-Some problems that may develop if they are not addressed include
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Varicose veins
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Venous insufficiency
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Lower back ache
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Sleeplessness
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Angry muscles
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Spider veins
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Foot problems
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Swollen ankles
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FatigueThere are many more areas of concern and to check some of these out I refer you towww.hazards.org/standing A problem for the trade show professional is that while many endurance runners and walkers haverecovery plans available to them, they do not-and by the time the show closes for the end of the day,the stand put back in order and restocked for the next day, and then the trip home to preparephysically and mentally it is time to be going back to open the stand again
What options for recovery does the stand attendant have?They can recoverpassivelyor take anactiverole in their own recovery
Trade Show aching legs and Accidental Athlete’s leg health2009 Copyright Michael Gillan 2http://aching-legs.org/exhibitor_stand_leg_relief.html
Accidental Athletesand recovery
The area of leg health is one that everyone to some extent or another is responsible for either forthemselves or someone else’s-it is something which can’t be bought and which is under appreciateduntil something goes wrong with the body and that can start withaching legs
Aching legs
The reason foraching legsas it affects the stand attendant-too much standing and walking
The body is basically a column of blood and other fluids (between 65% and 85% is water) held upright bythe body structures which is subject to pressure from gravity and air pressure-left to its own devices it alltries to accumulate in the lowest part it can find
The lower legs and feet
The only thing that stops it running out all over the ground is the ends of the toes-this is why whenever a cuthappens that is quite deep, one of the main strategies to slow and stop the bleeding is to elevate the parthigher than the heart-this reduces the pressure and hopefully the bleeding by reversing gravity and pressure
What happens when the legs are not working properly-swollen ankles as the fluid builds up
Getting this back up the legs so it can be absorbed back into the body can be a problemHow can gravity and atmospheric pressure be utilized to help the legs to stop aching?
We could simply use the recommended way of doing it-and reverse the flow so that some of theweight of fluid flows back up the legs to the bodyThis way reverses the flow from the feetThis is known as
passive
recovery because it relies on the blood and fluid to leave the legs andthen the legs can recover themselves- because of the time it takes for all this to work (unknown), thelegs which may be sore, stiffen up and on standing, walking may be difficult to do
Trade Show aching legs and Accidental Athlete’s leg health2009 Copyright Michael Gillan 3http://aching-legs.org/exhibitor_stand_leg_relief.html As the old blood and fluids have left the legs through the veins, new blood will have been pumpedthere by the heart through the arteries, but it too will have gone coldAll this fluid from the legs has to go somewhere so it goes again to the lowest part of the body, thistime towards the head-on standing many people will go dizzy and disoriented for a few minutes,they may even fall over or trip-this lasts until everything equalises and they regain equilibrium
If You Don’t Move It You Lose ItThis also goes for the legs and the muscles
While you have been lying with the legs elevated the muscles also stiffen up and they may go toolight-the muscles in the legs forget how to move because they are not getting any feedback frompressure and stretch receptors located in the skin, muscle tissues and joints about their environmentand position in relation to the rest of the bodyAll the feedback goes back to a part of the brain called the Cerebellum in latin this means smallbrain-with all the information supplied to it, it compares where the muscles are now, and where theyshould be-this information is sent to the brain which organises the smooth movement of the bodypart to where it is going to
In these runners who have been on the track for 3 days, the legs have stopped moving,they could not get up and walk in a straight line if they tried
Using an ‘active’ recovery method would both increase the removal of used blood from thelower legs and help the Cerebellum regain its use as a comparator so the legs can worksmoothly again
This is an‘active’method of leg recovery
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