How does compression wear help with blood flow?
In: Biology
Think of it this way, your heart does not *pull* blood up from your legs, it’s only built to *push* blood into your arteries. Veins are passive returns to the heart, it relies on higher pressure in the atereies to push blood back through the veins to the heart. Muscle action and one-way valves in the veins are also important, but not super relevant here.
The idea of compression is that when the extremities are compressed, there’s less volume for blood to hang around. Positive pressure from the arteries is enough to push blood back up the veins because there simply isn’t anywhere else for the blood to go.
Without compression, blood can hang around. Especially if you’re mostly sedentary, there just is not much happening to move the blood back up the veins, so it just pools.
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