Sore muscles are one of the less pleasant side effects of exercise. Depending on the type and intensity of the workout, muscle soreness after a workout can range from barely noticeable to extremely painful. Why Do Our Muscles Get Sore in the First Place?
Muscle soreness after exercise (also referred to as delayed-onset muscle soreness, or DOMS) signals that you caused damage to your muscle tissue, according to the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM). When this damage, or micro-tearing, happens, your body initiates the repair process by triggering inflammation at the injured site, says Shawn Arent, PhD, CSCS, a professor and the chair in the department of exercise science at the University of South Carolina in Columbia and the director of its sports science lab.
Fluid accumulates in the muscles, putting extra pressure on the damaged areas, leading to that familiar sensation of tightness and pain that typically begins to develop 12 to 24 hours after your workout, Dr. Arent says.
While you create a little bit of damage every time you exercise, certain types of workouts are notorious for higher levels of damage and — by extension — soreness. In particular, any workout that’s new to you, more intense than usual, or involves a lot of eccentric movements will likely cause more damage and muscle soreness than other types of workouts.
It’s the eccentric, or lengthening muscle, contractions that are causing the soreness, says Jan Schroeder, PhD, the chair and a professor in the department of kinesiology at California State University in Long Beach. Think: walking or jogging down a hill, or the lowering motion during a biceps curl or chest press. Your muscles typically sustain greater damage during these types of movements than during concentric exercises (ones where your muscle is working as it is shortening). Muscles face a lot of stress during both types of movement, but fewer muscle fibers get recruited to carry out eccentric contractions versus concentric ones (such as curling a dumbbell or pressing weight overhead), according to one review.
Torn, inflamed muscles sound bad — and we certainly want to minimize inflammation in our normal daily lives, because research has shown chronic inflammation contributes to many chronic diseases. But some degree of inflammation can be an important signal for muscle growth and repair, according to Arent. If you help your muscles recover from the damage, they’ll likely grow back bigger and stronger. “It’s not so much that we don’t want inflammation to occur, but we want to get it under control as soon as possible,” Arent says.
You may have heard that stretching can help prevent injury and soreness. But static stretching your muscles before you exercise is probably not a good idea. “I’m not a fan of stretching before you start training,” Arent says.
A 2021 review found that post-exercise stretching had no significant positive or negative effect on recovery compared to passive recovery (i.e., rest).
Some evidence suggests that a dynamic warmup immediately before a workout could reduce muscle soreness up to two days later, but the reduction in soreness seen in research has been very small.
Source: everydayhealth
