Waking up with your muscles in pain isn’t the best motivator when it comes to keeping up with your 2020 exercise routine. It’s hard enough when it’s cold, dark and gloomy outside, but when your workouts are leaving you so sore you can’t walk, you might be tempted to slip back into old habits and just stay on the sofa watching Netflix instead.
But actually that soreness might be the sign of a workout well done. What you’re likely experiencing when your muscles ache the day after a tough gym session is something called DOMS: delayed onset muscle soreness.
When you put your muscles to work, tiny tears appear in the muscle fibres, and it's repairing these tears that leads to inflammation and soreness. DOMS happens after your muscles lengthen under tension, something called eccentric muscle contraction. For example when you’re lowering down a weight and your arm extends slowly, and the muscle tears slightly. It’s also common after downhill running, rock climbing and resistance based exercises.
“We call it the good pain because it shows that your training session was actually quite effective,” says Aamer Sandoo, lecturer in sport and exercise science at Bangor University in Wales. When the muscle repairs those tears, it makes it stronger. With exercise, we're trying to cause trauma to the muscle and the body's response is to make a stronger muscle by depositing more fibres within it.
The pain has nothing to do with lactic acid. While lactic acid does build up during exercise, it disappears within a few minutes. The pain is actually inflammation, which doesn’t set in until the body begins to heal torn muscles – that’s why the pain doesn’t come until the next day or sometimes even later.
When you work your muscles in a new routine for the first time or after a long break you could experience pain for up to 72 hours. But if you do the same exercise again, you will feel less sore. It’s a phenomenon called the repeated bout effect – your muscles adapt within a matter of days so you don’t feel the same pain as last time.
“You might not necessarily become more powerful or fitter, but your muscles are quite good at protecting themselves from being damaged to that sort of level quite quickly,” says Richard Blagrove, a lecturer in physiology at Loughborough University.
A little soreness isn’t dangerous in itself, but if you push yourself too hard too quickly, it can result in more extreme pain where you are left unable to use your limbs the next day. In the worst case scenario, it can bring about a condition called rhabdomyolysis where muscle fibres die, releasing stress hormones and other chemicals into the bloodstream which are toxic to the kidneys.
To make sure you aren’t going too hard, you need to tailor your exercise plan to your individual strength and fitness level. Start your new exercise regime at a level that is realistic while still pushing yourself a little. It is far better to ease into it and step up your exercise routine as you see fit.
“In terms of public health, that has quite important implications because if people get so sore and desperate and can't move around then it puts them off doing that sort of exercise again,” says Blagrove.
If you’re keen to get back to exercise after experiencing DOMS, then it’s better to exercise another muscle group while the first heals. So if your legs hurt from a run, work out your arms during your next session. “Your muscle is not going to be as strong as it was before the damage until it's been repaired,” says Sandoo. “There's no point. Once you've got DOMS, you need to give it a chance to heal properly.”
If you really can't wait to get back to the gym, there are a couple of things you can do that might help speed up your recovery. A study from Loughborough University found that drinking chocolate milk may help alleviate the symptoms of DOMS, while another study from the Centre for Health Sciences at Ithaca College in New York found that massages may reduce the intensity of the soreness.
If you are experiencing DOMS, it's important not to push yourself too hard. The fact that you are experiencing it at all means that your muscles will soon come back stronger, and you’ll be able to perform even better next time. In the meantime, eat some protein, drink some chocolate milk and relax. “The key thing really is adequate rest and good nutrition,” says Sandoo.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
