An innovative fabric for muscle recovery

If you happen to suffer from muscle soreness or a torn muscle while running or doing sport, you may be able to "entrust" your recovery from that kind of injury to a new fabric designed and created with support from the cohesion policy funding.

Technology, as exemplified by one of the beneficiaries of the incentive, which focuses on the production of sports and casual clothing, has been patented, and since June 2024, the first garments utilizing it have been on the market.

The research and development project, funded during the 2014-2020 programming period from ROP ERDF LOMBARDIA and involved the University of Brescia through the multi-sectoral and technological service center and another private partner that works on production of technological machinery in the field of fabrics. The total amount of the financing was approximately 720 thousand euros.

The result is the commercialization of "all compression accessories". In particular, “the first product created on the basis of funding coming from Lombardy Region was related to the quadriceps, so we are talking about the leg; subsequently, a calf support was developed, while the forearm is in the final testing phase". The intervention was preceded by market research, which showed how all the fabrics aimed at muscle recovery on the market used exclusively knitted fabrics, "socks". With this intervention, on the other hand, in technical fabric garments made for the racing sector, has experimented with warp wefts, "shuttle fabrics", with elastomers that are highly capable of maintaining performance over time and guaranteeing greater product durability.

“The testing helped us understand how to create a fabric capable of accompanying physiotherapy recovery, starting from the definition of the compression standards to be given to a muscle that has suffered an injury” underlines Loda. In practice, after a treatment, physiotherapists normally apply a muscle bandage, with various levels of compression which, however, are inconsistent over time and last a day or at most two. The technology developed aims to replicate this system, therefore offering the equivalent of a constant compression treatment.

Initially, the accessories were designed for "passive" recovery, but now, following the indications of some testers, analyses were also conducted in an "active" context,  i.e. during a competition (the pilot testing in May 2024 concerns 70 different athletes engaged in a race).

In the 2020-2021 school year, a team that participated in the At the School of OpenCohesion monitored the project in a previous phase: the students of the “Oscar Arnulfo Romero” high school in Albino (BG) in their Monithon report recall how Val Seriana has represented for hundreds of years an area in which fabrics in the most diverse fields are "study[ed] and designed". Evaluating the effectiveness of the intervention, which supported the research activity, they underlined the results: “A patent was obtained for a fabric for muscle recovery; a prototype of two garments for muscle recovery was created; we are waiting for scientific data for the scale production of products with innovative characteristics." Furthermore, the stdents from the Val Seriana Task Force team explain, "the industrial costs are limited and the final costs amount to around 20 euros per product".