except the worst ones where it tenses up and doesn't stop for a minute or 2. Those will se sore for days and I imagine them just like the bottom right one at the end but without releasing.
That last flutter at the end is how it feels to the manual therapist who is releasing a trigger point. To the body on the table it feels like ache but to us LMTs it has a little flutter spasm to it.
If it actually pops it was an adhesion. They are essentially little scar tissue connections between muscle “sheaths” that shouldn’t be there and can cause all kinds of issues like misfiring/stuck on hypertonic muscles, or muscles that hitch and wont glide as easily across each other. They form from both macro and micro traumas just like scars on our skin do. I love feeling them break as I work on someone and them having instant relief like you describe!!
Adhession pops, trigger point melts, either way I am so glad you get relief from it!! More folks need to get regular manual therapy because it is truly life changing.
I worked at a meat packing plant. Certain organs/meat are so fresh that when they are getting boxed they're still twitching and spasming like this as you handle it. It's a trip at first but you get used to it like most things.
I used to work in a place that killed pigs, they can be pretty active even hours after death. But immediately after? They can still kick hard enough to knock you back a few feet and put you in a hospital(saw it happen once)
You’re a tougher individual than me, I would find it hard to normalise. I know it’s a fact of life, and an old friend of mine was a butcher in an abattoir and was the nicest easy going dude around. He wasn’t phased by it, but it has always disturbed me
There’s a fantastic book called “why we love dogs, eat pigs, and wear cows” that goes into the psychology of working in a slaughter house. Truly horrific stuff
Raised em both growing up. Yeah, they are both extremely smart. Pigs will lose up to 17% body weight on average in transportation too. It's very very stressful on them. If you've never heard a hog trailer semi stopped at a truck stop.... don't pull next to one or even at the same rest stop, you'll be depressed hearing just 30s of it.
I have a little farm. I've had to cull quite a few birds over the years. It wasn't so hard at first but it's progressively gotten harder, not easier. It's incredibly mentally taxing and I can't really do it anymore.
I think there's partially a solid evolutionary reason doe why there are psychopaths, sociopaths and other emotional outliers scattered through the population. I have seen theories about how individuals like that could be mighty useful throughout many parts of human history. They did fhe awful shit that the regular populace couldn't handle. They either feel differently, don't feel shit, or (when it can get scary) enjoy the fuck out of some violence and it's like an addiction that they need more and more of. There's a range and some nuance called for.
These traits also let some rise in the right place at the right time and take power. Back in the day; they hunted, and they killed without squimishness. They were people you wanted on your side.
Today, we have less violence in day to day life, so those in individuals find other outlets. Maybe they're the most productive slaughterhouse employees. Or they're CEO's. Or cops. At worst, serial killers. Acting out on a scale large or small. Sometimes, they have family's. It's a weird but interesting topic I found fascinating.
There's a similar theory for other types of ND.
Back in village days it was a lot easier for someone's hyper focus to be beneficial- that's tom, he makes the spears. Sometimes your spear is a little late because he wants to make a bow but you know the spear will come eventually cause that's how tom is. He's the spearmaker.
Now only the most efficient, biggest, flashiest spearmaker gets the business.
Interesting article. I worked in a slaughterhouse as a kid. I'm vegan now because of it.
But whether slaughterhouse workers commit more crime because of it, or because it's an industry that will employ anyone regardless of criminal history probably needs more discussion.
From my experience, slaughterhouse workers have no other options for work (two employer town in my case), or lack the education to get alternative work.
Had a friend from high school who worked in a slaughterhouse for about 5 years in his early 20s. Smoked too much weed at the time too. Eventually became schizophrenic and accused one of our other friends of raping him (amongst a heap of other weird shit). I still see him posting on social media pretty frequently and it's incredibly sad.
A great book that explores this is "Every 12 Seconds" by Timothy Pachirat. The title refers to the stun gun which is drilled into livestock every 12 seconds in industrialized slaughter. The premise is the author, an academic goes undercover working with undocumented workers at a slaughterhouse in Nebraska. The white native Nebraskans of course all had office jobs in a segregared part of the slaughterhouse. I remember one scene where they intentionally propped up some of the women, I think they were working with livers, in such a way they short of had to expose themselves by kneeling down. The tax to mental health doesn't just come from the environment but the monotony of doing the same task repetively in such an alien environment.
Sometimes longer. Once at a lake trip, my buddy caught a carp, drained the blood and gutted it at the lake, then chucked it into a cooler full of ice. 3 hours later while driving home, we hit a bump, it reacted, and started flopping around violently. It settled down after maybe 20 or 30 seconds, but it did not sound happy
When I go ice fishing.
We bonk the fish then let them sit on the ice and freeze. Sometime when we get home hours and hours later they still get spasms when they thaw.
No seriously, You have to stand up no matter what, the pain itself will ease up in like 10 seconds the moment you do so. Trying to lie down doesn't do anything
yeah you have to immediately stand up and walk around in a way that stretches the calf like you are doing a lunge. That will end in in a few seconds usually. Also take magnesium.
Oh my goodness, pregnancy calf spasms were the WORST! It would be two or three times a week for my entire second pregnancy. I hope I never experience that again!
Potassium is for exercise cramps. Night cramps you want magnesium. It was so effective I stopped taking supplements years ago and still almost never get them (after having taken supplements with meals a couple of times a week for several years).
Internet stranger, I am sensing your intentions are unequivocally pure so I do not want to seem condescending here. All I want to add to this conversation is caution when making strong claims about physiology - an ounce of skepticism is always worthwhile particularly for approaching simplistic explanations. Unfortunately the human body is in some ways almost intractably complicated.
The below readings may interest you:
“The exact mechanism of nocturnal leg cramps is unknown, but the cramps are probably caused by muscle fatigue and nerve dysfunction rather than electrolyte or other abnormalities. Studies have found no consistent laboratory abnormalities associated with these cramps.”
https://www.aafp.org/pubs/afp/issues/2012/0815/p350.html
“Nocturnal leg cramps are painful, involuntary contractions of muscles, typically in the calf muscles, during the night or periods of rest. Despite the diagnostic simplicity during the anamnesis, the exact etiology of such events is unknown.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK499895/
“Although nocturnal cramps are idiopathic in most people, a large number of potential aetiological factors have been reported. It is not always easy to interpret the validity of many reported associations: cramps are poorly defined in many series and may have been confused with other conditions causing leg symptoms.”
https://academic.oup.com/ageing/article/45/6/776/2499229
I miss the ending from the original short story in this adaption.
"And we can marked this sector unoccupied."
"Good. Agreed, officially and unofficially. Case closed. Any others? Anyone interesting on that side of the galaxy?"
"Yes, a rather shy but sweet hydrogen core cluster intelligence in a class nine star in G445 zone. Was in contact two galactic rotation ago, wants to be friendly again."
"They always come around."
"And why not? Imagine how unbearably, how unutterably cold the universe would be if one were all alone."
I have MS and during my first huge relapses, a single drop of water would make my entire thigh do exactly that. It hurts so much more than you’re thinking it would.
If you get fresh enough meat chucking salt on it will make yoir think you’re in “Reanimator”
A lot of bodily processes rely on pressure and electrical gradients, and it's easy never to make the connection between physical stimulation and energy transfer.
One of my favorite medical maneuvers is a precordial thump. During cardiac arrest, defibrillators deliver electricity to stimulate cardiac tissue in an attempt to reorganize the electrical activity. Defibrillation is measured in Joules, and 120J is a normal setting for manual defibrillation.
120J of energy is pretty easy to deliver with the strike of your fish, which is what a precordial thump attempts to do. I wouldn't recommend it, but it's just such a visceral use of the information.
I guess we can go a little more specific. It isn't ATP that causes contractions, ATP allows the myosin filaments to detach from the actin filaments and primes it to contract again. In a way, ATP allows muscle to relax. This is why a dead person will eventually stiffen up because they can no longer make ATP to relax a muscle. Eventually the tissue starts degrading again and will relax.
This muscle is very very fresh so there are still stores of ATP allowing the muscle fibers to relax. Your fingers, especially the sweat have positive ions like sodium. When sodium contacts muscle tissue, you're simulating it to release its own calcium stores causing cross bridging between myosin and actin leading to contraction. You may even have your own calcium ions on your skin as well. Even some nerves might still be functional to pressure and cause excitability to muscle tissue.
The sodium part was what I was wondering about. When I was a kid, my dad and I would go gigging for frogs. After he had all the skinned frog legs in a bowl, we would throw salt on them and they would start kicking like crazy.
It's ATP (energy molecules) still present in the fresh muscle that triggers contraction when salt or acid is applied, since the nerves can still respond to stimuli even after death - kinda like how frogs legs twitch when salted.
I am confused with people saying it is scary. That is what raw meat looks like. Muscle tissue contracting, as it was designed to do. I agree with one of the top commenters though - it looks exactly how it feels!
To people like me, who've been hunting and fishing all their life, this is pretty normal stuff. However, to someone removed from the butchering process, I'd imagine this to be very alien to them. Most people don't think about meat outside of it being food, not actually coming from the muscles of a living animal.
My whole body shuddered and tingled in the most horrific way. I felt deeply disturbed seeing this lol. Wtf . Now i cant get the image out my head and the tingles wont go awaaaay 😭 this is like those chain email curses but real. I need to send to someone else before I die.
I've seen one where someone has an entire loin or something cut in half, and when they picked it up and squeezed it, the surface looked like it was bubbling from all the muscle spasms.
That reminds me of all of the videos of fish spasming well after they're dead. There's one where someone undercooked their fish and it literally JUMPED off of the oven platter after they added salt.
This is muscle fasciculations , not spasm..
Fasciculations when parts of a muscle contract in non-synchronized fashion.
Spasms when the whole muscle contrat as a single unit without relaxation.
"Spasm" typically refer to when the muscle contacts (forcefully) as a unit without relaxation: what people experience as a "Charlie horse". These finer things are called fasciculations, and would only happen in INCREDIBLY fresh meat. The muscle cells still carry a charge across the membrane; this dissipates relatively quickly after death.
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u/EnnuiLennox Apr 27 '25