What Is Recovery Like Moving Implants From Under to Over the Muscle?

If you currently have breast implants placed under the muscle and you're considering moving them over the muscle, you might be wondering — what's recovery actually like?

For most patients, I find that recovery from this procedure is actually a little easier than a primary augmentation under the muscle. When we repair the muscle back to the chest wall, that does add a bit more tenderness to the post-op recovery period. But I use long-acting numbing agents in the operating room, and the medications we use with ERAS protocols typically leave patients pretty comfortable.

The average patient after having a muscle repair and implant plane change follows this general timeline:

• Back to work: within one week
• Back to driving: within one week
• Off pain medicines: five to seven days
• Light activity: after four weeks
• Full exercise (heavy lifting, running, push-ups): one to two months

It's very rare for this patient population to actually use any of their opioid medicines. They have a prescription and they never use them.

After a muscle repair, we want to give the pectoralis major muscle enough time to heal and scar down to the chest wall where we've sutured it. So you do need to behave yourself for about four weeks when it comes to exercise. But I typically release patients to do anything they want at one month, and by two months people are usually back to everything — even heavy lifting and push-ups.

ERAS stands for Enhanced Recovery After Surgery. We've studied these protocols for quite some time in medicine across a variety of different surgeries. Our goal as surgeons is to make your recovery as easy as possible, and all of these advances have done exactly that.

In summary, switching implants from under the muscle to over the muscle with a muscle repair is a bit easier recovery than a primary breast augmentation. But for both surgeries, recovery is pretty manageable for the average patient — especially with modern ERAS protocols.