Now you’ve done it. Run too far, lifted too much, or played tennis too long. You’re worried that you may have injured skeletal muscle but even while you’re rounding up ice packs, your muscle cells are already frantically trying to cope. Ruptures in the plasma membrane of skeletal muscle cells can lead to uncontrolled contractions, damaging the sarcolemma, the transparent sheath that holds muscle fibers in compact bundles. Exactly how repair proteins come to the rescue of damaged plasma membrane is laid out in revealing detail in a new JCB paper by Alexis Demonbreun of the University of Chicago, ASCB member Elizabeth McNally at Northwestern University, and colleagues at both places. “Within seconds,” say the researchers, of delivering a laser wound to live mammalian myofibers, they observed a variety of fluorescently tagged proteins from the annexin family flock to the site, recruiting actin to help annexin 6 build a “cap” over the damage. Soon after, other muscle repair proteins including dysferlin landed next to the cap and started building their own “shoulder” subdomain as a distinct part of the repair complex.