What Causes Muscle Fatigue & How Compression Clothing Helps

Why Muscles Get Tired

It’s all because of oxygen.

Oxygen fuels our muscles during exercise, powering us to go further, to go faster and to cross the finish line.

When you don’t have enough oxygen you produce lactic acid, causing the burning sensation and tiredness every runner has felt at some point.

Then there’s the heart – the further and harder you go, the faster your heart has to beat. And once again, it’s all down to oxygen:

• Blood passes through the lungs, where it picks up oxygen to deliver to the muscles (oxygenated blood)
• The heart pumps oxygenated blood to your muscles where it drops of the oxygen your muscles need and picks up waste lactic acid
• The blood – now deoxygenated – returns to the heart through your veins, ready to start the whole process again

So to reduce tiredness and fatigue, you need to be able to deliver oxygen more efficiently. But you also need to get deoxygenated blood back to the heart and remove lactic acid from your muscles as quickly as possible.

That’s where compression running clothes come into their own.

How Compression Clothing Works

Compression clothing is graduated, with greater pressure on the muscles further from the heart compared to those closer to it.

Take a tight for example. It’s tighter around the ankle than it is around the knee, squeezing the calf muscles and giving your veins a helping hand to push deoxygenated blood back up the legs and towards the heart.

It means you can:

• Run further as you’ll get more oxygen into the blood to power your muscles
• Recover faster because you’ll be removing waste lactic acid quicker, reducing soreness in the muscles

Head-To-Toe - How Our Clothing Uses Compression

The Muscle Support range is designed specifically for running, and targets key areas to reduce muscle vibration and improve your posture. So as well as giving you the compression you need, it’s doing much more as well.

Compression Running Tights

• You get muscle support in the areas you need it most – the knees and quads. It cuts down on muscle vibration, and backs it up with a core belt that helps improve your posture.

Compression Calf Sleeve

• Perfect when it’s too hot for full-length tights, it helps to increase circulation of deoxygenated blood from your calf muscles and back to the heart.

Compression Calf Support

• Keeps your calf muscles in place and reduces vibration so they can work more efficiently and recover faster.

Compression Sock

• Provides pressure from the ankle to the calf to increase bloodflow and also reduces vibration in the muscles during your run, helping them work more efficiently.

Compression Top

• These work to adjust your posture, opening up the chest and allowing you to take in more oxygen to feed your muscles.

Shop our collection of running gear for choices in compression clothing:

• For Men
• For Women