Movement

Muscle pump

Your circulation does not run on your heart alone. Every time a muscle contracts it squeezes the vessels running through it and pushes fluid back toward the centre of the body — so movement is the pump, and stillness switches it off. Good looks like: regular, gentle contraction and joint motion through an area, often enough that fluid keeps leaving rather than pooling. This is why swelling that lingers is usually a movement problem rather than a fluid problem, and why resting an area completely tends to keep it congested and stiff exactly where it most needs the traffic.