The purpose of this experiment was to investigate skeletal muscle blood flow and glucose uptake in m. Blood flow and glucose uptake were measured in the compressed and non-compressed leg of 6 healthy men by using positron emission tomography. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding: The study was in part financed by Sigvaris, Winterhur, Switzerland. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. No additional external funding was received for this study. None of the other authors have any ownership of stocks, employment or board membership at SIGVARIS AG or other companies with competing interests with relation to data presented here, neither financial, professional, nor personal.
Skeletal muscle blood flow incorporates a key role in aerobic muscle metabolism matching the delivery of oxygen and energy substrates for energetic demands, as well as the transportation of waste products and heat from the muscle tissue. The response of skeletal muscle blood flow and metabolism at the onset of and during exercise are well documented.
In general, muscle blood flow increases rapidly with an exercise-depended plateau after approximately 30 s of exercise [1] , [2]. Muscle blood flow is heterogeneously distributed [3] in a manner that it is higher in the deeper compared to the superficial parts of the m. Another point is that blood glucose concentration plays an important role in restoring muscle glycogen during recovery from exercise [5]. Unfortunately, little is known about the crucial role of blood flow and its association to glucose uptake, during recovery from high intensity exercise [6] and so far no study investigated this matter in connection with the application of compression clothing.
In the past two decades, various forms of compression clothing have been applied by elite and recreational athletes due to accumulating evidence regarding the possible performance [7] , [8] and recovery [9] β [11] enhancing properties. Early research showed that the application of 15 mmHg external pressure while lying in supine position reduces the cross-sectional area of the venous systems from 2.
