The Day After You Workout
Whether you’re new to regular exercise or haven’t been active for a while, there’s a tendency for our muscles to experience the discomfort of delayed muscle soreness from time to time.
Muscle soreness (or DOMS) occurs shortly after recovering from strenuous activity or excessive stretching of the muscle fibers. Many feel this is an accomplishment of muscle growth or signals that your body is growing stronger, but this can often be deceiving.
Some guys have DOMS-related symptoms longer than others, which can feel painful to train through as you struggle to keep your weekly training consistent. This tends to question whether training through muscle soreness is really beneficial or not.
And is there a way to reduce any of the symptoms of delayed muscle soreness?
What is Delayed Onset Muscle Syndrome?
Muscle soreness is mainly a cause of microscopic tears to the muscle fiber from an applied force. This force can originate from strength training or any activity that causes the muscles to lengthen during an impact (jogging, step aerobics, jumping, etc.)
Soreness was commonly thought to originate from the build-up of lactic acid within the muscles, but this false information has been ruled out by exercise physiologists recently.
The true cause of soreness from exercise comes from the inflammatory response that your body sends to muscles undergoing strenuous activity. Your body releases neutrophils, a type of white blood cell, that’s mobilized to microscopic tears to begin repair of muscle fibers.
Muscle soreness can become a burden for athletes as it greatly limits training. People often feel less motivated to exercise, the muscles have limited range of motion while they’re recovering, and there is a greater risk of injury.
Best Solutions for Muscle Soreness
If your muscles are too tired from the work performed from the routine before, this can start to affect your strength in the long term. To prevent this, you may want to use some methods to decrease the likelihood that you’ll experience DOMS:
Warming Up: Starting a light warm-up for the muscles group that you’ll training is always a wise decision, as this will ensure you have enough blood pumped to prepare for your heavier sets. This may also prevent your muscles from being as sore the next day. Warm-ups can be any dynamic movements that will get your increase your heartrate for a minimum of 5 minutes. (see How to Properly Stretch Before A Workout)
Training More Frequently: There has never been a clear explanation on why, but working out more frequently tends to keep muscle soreness at bay, as training through soreness gives our muscles better conditioning for future workouts. Try to train at least three times a week, especially when starting a brand new exercise program.
Supplements:
As the latest research has shown that muscle soreness is connected with the inflammatory response of white blood cells, anti-oxidants can be beneficial to decreasing DOMS shortly after a workout. Any beverage with blended dark berries, such as cranberry or mixed blueberry juice, can be used shortly after exercising.
The Wrap Up
The soreness experienced shortly after exercising can be sign that there’s been microscopic damage done to the muscle, but it’s not necessarily a sign of new strength or hypertrophy. Experienced weightlifters experience DOMS and there are a few solutions you can use to alleviate the discomfort of training sore muscles. If all the solutions fail to relieve pain to the area, try to take a couple weeks from the exercise until the pain subsides.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.