Minimizing Muscle Soreness

Before we get into minimizing muscle soreness, we need to first establish what exactly happens
to our bodies when we feel this horrible feeling after most workouts!

This feeling is called Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness, this is also known as the “ no pain, no
gain” aspect of training, everyone and their dad has already heard this phrase , basically
referring to the immense amount of muscle tightness and soreness after a hard workout. DOMS
(Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness) is most noticeable either at the beginning of a new training
cycle , or when introducing a new style of training into your program. A big contributor to DOMS
is also intensity and duration of intensity of your workouts , meaning , how intense and how long
you’re intense for, is a big indicator of how sore you’ll be after the workout.

There are 5 main mechanisms for muscle soreness after a workout, Lactic acid buildup, muscle
spasms, connective tissue damage, muscle damage and inflammation. This can affect your
physical performance by causing reduced joint range of motion, shock attenuation and peak
power. This means that you will feel very “tight” as well as if you were to go on a run you will feel
more of the impact from your feet hitting the ground than you would normally, and your power
output during workouts will be diminished, this is why it is suggested to give a given muscle
group 48-72 hours rest between training sessions, so that you can have a proper recovery.

The most common cause of DOMS is eccentric training, this means focusing on the negative
part of a movement, for example , if doing a pushup, when bringing yourself to the bottom
position of the movement you would take 3-4 seconds to get there, and then you would explode
up as fast as you can, this type of training is said to recruit many more muscle fibres, as well as
increase the likelihood to DOMS.

So, now that we know what DOMS is, we can start to understand how to treat it, the most
common pathways for treatment of muscle soreness are putting ice on the tender muscle to
avoid inflammation , get a massage to improve blood flow as well as to loosen up the damaged
tissues, get into a stretching routine to keep flexibility and mobility in your joints and muscles, go
for walks and swims whenever you can, again , this will help with blood circulation through your
muscles and body, allowing for lactic acid to not build up in your sore muscles. Build up
eccentric exercises slowly, this means that you should not jump into a 4 second negative right
away, build up from the bottom meaning start with 1 second , and every week add a second
until you can comfortably do 4 seconds , this will reduce soreness as well as chance of injury
because you aren’t taxing your stretch reflex as much. Lastly, take a warm bath, once again to
loosen up tight muscles as well as encourage blood circulation.

If we can observe one common trend in the treatment of DOMS it’s blood circulation, you are
gonna want to circulate blood around your body as much as possible when recovering from
muscle soreness, as well as trying to loosen up the sore muscles by stretching, stretching and
stretching some more! Stretching not only reduces injury potential but it also allows us to keep
our muscles loose and our joints mobile, this is crucial in reducing DOMS because once again ,
stretching helps circulate blood which reduces lactic acid build up which reduces soreness!