muscle soreness (DOMS), also called muscle fever, is the pain and stiffness felt in muscles several hours to days after unaccustomed or strenuous exercise. The soreness is felt most strongly 24 to 72 hours after the exercise.
Some pain is unavoidable in your quest to get a fit and healthy body, but hopefully not too much!
How can you prevent soreness?
How can you treat soreness that you already have?
Is there anything you can do to make it less likely that you will get as sore? Things you can do during your workout (like stretching or starting slow with your new program), or after (like taking protein, HMB, or glutamine)?
Should you use cardio or stretching the next day to get the blood flowing or will that just make it worse?
Soreness is a condition commonly brought on by weight training. It is seen most prevalently in individuals who have just begun to perform resistance exercise, are resuming their training after a prolonged layoff, or have made a drastic change in their program.
Although the precise details of the mechanisms that cause soreness are unknown, "what is certain is that lactic acid (a transient by-product of muscle contraction) has nothing to do with it" effectively knocking out any myth-driven possibility of associating the two with each other.
WHAT IS LACTIC ACID?
Lactic Acid is mostly made by muscle tissue and red blood cells. When the oxygen level in the body is normal, carbohydrate breaks down into water and carbon dioxide. When the oxygen level is low, carbohydrate breaks down for energy and make lactic acid.
Lactic acid levels get higher when strenuous exercise or other conditions-such as heart failure, a severe infection (sepsis), or shock-lower the flow of blood and oxygen throughout the body. Lactic acid levels can also get higher when the liver is severely damaged or diseased, because the liver normally breaks down lactic acid.
Interestingly, it is an occurrence that has triggered the rise of countless questions concerning it. Although the issue regarding soreness seems legitimate, it is one undeserving of such excessive worry and attention.
Ironically enough, some questions about soreness point to some peculiar intrinsic desire to achieve soreness after every workout, the reason being that these individuals have a fixation on using soreness as the sole marker for results and hypertrophy development. The basic question, then, is, "If I am no longer feeling soreness after my workouts, does it mean that the quality of my workouts has dropped?" Certainly not.
Aside from misinformed hearsay, a probable explanation for the soreness myth can be traced back to a beginner's initial workouts, the aftereffects of which would likely be the onset of soreness as well as a marked increase in target muscle size.
Oftentimes, with the propensity for beginners to favor training of their arms or chest, the "growth" is especially noticeable. The reality, however, is that much of this "growth" is the result of the temporary diversion of carbohydrates, in the form of glycogen, and water towards muscle stores.
And although neuromuscular adaptation mechanisms and myofibrillar hypertrophy are taking place within the body, short-lived but exaggerated initial sarcoplasmic hypertrophy is masking those gains, and so the individual tends to instinctively draw a positive association only between muscle soreness and muscle size. Neural drive and strength development are tossed out the window.
WHAT DOES HEREIN MEAN?
Myofibrillar hypertrophy is a type of hypertrophy (growth and increase of the size of muscle cells) in which the myofibrils in a muscle cell increase in number and add to muscular strength as well as a small increase in the size of the muscle.
Due to the limited extent to which water and glycogen can be stored within our muscles, this phenomenal increase in visible growth tapers off quite rapidly. At the same time, soreness begins to dissipate as the individual becomes more and more conditioned to his training protocol.
Is it no wonder that one would argue that there is a correlation between the two? They are both observed to heighten and abate with respect to each other, and so one cannot blame the camp that sees fit to train exclusively for soreness. Aside from those individuals, there is that other group of people that wishes to reduce or prevent soreness entirely.
HOW CAN YOU PREVENT
SORENESS?
It is not a matter of preventing soreness, but rather minimizing both the frequency and severity with which it occurs.
Solutions to this problem are anecdotal at best. Two widespread beliefs regarding how to prevent muscle soreness are glutamine supplementation and, of course, stretching. In all honesty, there exists too much controversy to settle on a definitive answer. The available studies always contradict each other. Stretching is an especially questionable practice.
STRETCHING
STRETCHING
In a 1995 study published in the German magazine Sportmedizin, neither static stretching nor pre-workout stretching of any sort reduced post-workout muscle soreness, but rather aggravated it (Sportzmedizin 9:411-421).
This discovery was consolidated by a 2002 study performed at the School of Physiotherapy at the University of Sydney that concluded that stretching in amateur athletes did not alleviate soreness (British Medical Journal 325:468-470). A 2003 study in Manual Therapy landed on the same conclusions.
GLUTAMINE
As for glutamine, there "is no scientific evidence for a beneficial effect of oral glutamine supplementation on muscle repair after exercise-induced damage and no evidence of reduced muscle soreness when consuming glutamine compared with placebo" (Gleeson).
Mind you, there are just as many studies supporting stretching and glutamine supplementation as there are refuting it. The point here is that their efficacy is questionable, and the results are not consistent enough to warrant recommendation of either of these as preventative measures in warding off soreness.
HOW CAN YOU TREAT SORENESS THAT YOU ALREADY HAVE?
Aside from protein ingestion post-workout, there are other less feasible (but still worth the try) measures one may take to reduce soreness, which may or may not work depending on the person. Take these with a grain of salt.
Direct Icing
Direct icing of the muscle has been shown to reduce inflammation and soreness.
Alternating hot-and-cold showers.
Which appear to be similar in function to cardiovascular exercise, may improve blood circulation and alleviate soreness. However, although the hot shower dilates the blood vessels, it has been said to simultaneously increase inflammation as well.
For this reason, it is recommended that the shower be alternated with and end with cold water. On that same token, a session in the sauna may need to end with a dip under a showerhead spewing cold water. As an aside, Icy Hot may operate under a similar mechanism.
Eccentric Reps
As implied by more recent studies, limiting exaggeration of the eccentric (lowering) portion of reps may reduce the degree to which soreness is experienced, which, then again, is rather self-defeating as the eccentric induces more microtrauma to the muscle, which is what most of us want. Microtears in the muscle, by the way, are the more probable cause for muscle soreness, as suggested by contemporary studies.
Training Through Soreness.
A curious thing to note is that it is perfectly fine to train through soreness, as it actually decreases soreness and increases fitness. According to Bryan Haycock, the founder of Hypertrophy-Specific Training (HST), research has shown that muscles are designed to recuperate from microtrauma even while undergoing concurrent bouts of trauma (exercise), a premise made apparent in some training styles where such exercises as squats are performed every workout (i.e., three times a week, as on Mark Rippetoe's program and the 5x5).
Soreness will dissipate rather quickly once the body adapts. Of course, to be smart about it, one would have to lower either training load or volume to compensate for the increased frequency, but the premise is to continue to train and to do so relatively frequently against a backdrop of soreness. In addition, training frequency is negatively correlated with soreness.
"Waiting before soreness subsides before doing the next workout is a good way to guarantee that soreness will be produced every time, since the athlete never gets adapted to sufficient workload frequency to stop getting sore" (Rippetoe 213).
The implication: if one's training frequency is relatively high, soreness will dissipate much more quickly than with infrequent training, which will only prolong it.
"Soreness, unless it is extreme, is no impediment to training. In fact, many records have been set by sore athletes" (Rippetoe 213). And so, soreness is not a terrible monster that needs to be avoided at all costs. It is a normal occurrence that accompanies training and can be ignored, unless it is noticeably excessive. "But, in general, if the warm-up returns the movement to its normal range of motion, the workout can be done" (Rippetoe 213).
Should you use cardio or stretching the next day to get the blood flowing or will that just make it worse?
Cardio is actually quite effective in ridding the muscles of any cellular debris and waste that might have accumulated during intense weight training. Consequently, transport of nutrients and oxygen to the muscle is optimized, and there is some marginal benefit to dissipation of soreness.
Stretching in a cold state should be avoided, seeing how it actually increases the risk of injury due to the low viscosity of the synovial fluid. Stretching after cardio, on the other hand, is more reasonable. Even then, one should take care to avoid certain stretches that actually contribute to injury.
Of particular notoriety (and worthy of being mentioned at the cost of digression) is the straight-legged standing toe touch (even worse for people who aim past the toes and touch the floor), which was meant to stretch the hamstrings. And while hamstring flexibility is temporarily increased, the damage this can deal to the back far outweighs any justifications for continuing to do it.
From the very beginning, the signature rounded back should be a red flag to anyone observing someone performing this stretch. Overflexion of the spine - the culprit for the majority of back pain - is what occurs here.
We have always been taught not to round our backs and to bend at the knees when picking up something from the floor. Yet we ignore this simple tidbit of advice and round our backs just about 365 days out of the year. Every time we hunch over to scope the fridge shelves, when we pick up our laundry baskets, or when we bend over to tie our shoes, we are putting our backs in a precarious position.
Many stretches only aggravate the condition and facilitate the onset of debilitating back pain; toe stretches, butterfly stretches, down-the-middle splits, you name it.
Poor form in everyday activity is horrible by itself; making it a stretch is adding insult to injury. Why not top it all off with heavy deadlifts with a rounded back? One must pick and choose among the myriad of stretches and make an informed decision on which stretches benefit us, and which ones don't.
In the case of back health, one must choose to perform stretches that involve normal kyphotic and lordotic curvature of the spine (in the thoracic and lumbar regions of the spine, respectively). Discouraged from stretching yet? If its next-to-nonexistent benefits on soreness don't deter you, then its potential for increasing injury will. Please pardon the digression.
There are certainly some measures that one can take in preventing soreness, although they are few and far between. And even if more surefire methods to combating soreness were discovered, moderate soreness was never such a serious condition to begin with.
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