Muscle Soreness After Exercise And What To Do About It

A common complaint about exercise is how it can cause you to feel the following day. Sore muscles can affect everyone, whether it's your average amateur who works out 3 times a week or a professional athlete, but it can be a particular problem if it's been a while since you last did anything really physical.

Muscle soreness, otherwise known as Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness or DOMS, can be felt within a few hours of exercise but is generally at its worst after about 48 hours. After this the pain will begin to ease but can take several days to go completely. Once experienced it can put many people off exercise for good, or at least prevent them from being able to do so for more than a couple of times a week.

But there are some things that can be done to speed up recovery from muscle soreness or even prevent it occurring in the first place.

Causes

Muscle soreness (DOMS) caused by exercise is exactly the same as soreness caused by doing any physical activity you're not used to, whether this cycling for the first time in years, digging the garden or anything else that involves using muscles that aren't used to it. The reason is that when muscles are worked hard they are actually, at a microscopic level, damaged by what are called micro-tears. These micro-tears obviously need repairing, and it is this damage and repair process that causes the inflammation in muscles that is DOMS.

Each time muscles are worked hard they are repaired slightly stronger than they were to prevent further damage in the future. It is this process that causes muscles to get bigger, and by adapting the way you train it can be exploited to increase muscle mass and size, if this is your goal.

So if it was starting a new exercise regime that caused your soreness your muscles will get used to it, providing you keep it up. But if it was from an activity you usually only do once or twice a year your body obviously isn't going to use the energy required to adapt your muscles to it, so you'll be just as sore next time.

Treatment

If you wake up to find your muscles have decided to teach you a lesson for working them so hard, and making your way down the stairs, or even just getting out of bed, is an agonising ordeal, is there anything you can do?

Well the good news is yes, there are a couple of things that can help reduce the pain, but the bad news is that as the micro-tears in your muscles could technically be classed as an injury, like any other injury, healing takes time and cannot be rushed.

The best way to treat the pain of DOMS is to 'warm up' the muscles that need repairing and get plenty of blood to them with gentle exercise, ideally by using them for the same activity that caused the soreness in the first place. So if it was cycling that did it go cycling, if it was jogging go jogging etc. Just be sure to keep the intensity light. No more than 5 on the RPE scale or less than 50% effort. Do this for 10 or 15 minutes and then gently stretch the affected muscles. Each stretch should be held for 30 seconds.

This process can be repeated every day until the muscles have recovered, but do not train them properly until then. If it still hurts they need more time to rest and repair.

As it is inflammation of the 'damaged' muscles that causes the pain, another thing you can do is take an anti-inflammatory and/or painkiller to help. I'm not a trained physician however, so whether or not this is suitable for you is your decision.

Prevention

Much better than being unable or just unwilling to exercise due to DOMS is not to have it in the first place, and there are several things you can do to minimise the occurrence.

The first is to warm up and stretch before you exercise. Now you may have been told to do this before or read it somewhere else, but probably not what the purpose of it is which is why it usually gets neglected. Generally people exercise after several hours of little or no activity, whether this be sitting at a desk, driving, or watching TV. Then with no warning to their bodies, they suddenly start jogging or lifting weights and wonder why they're sore the next day. Or even worse, pull a muscle.

Instead, spend 10 minutes warming up by jogging, cycling or doing some other aerobic exercise at an RPE of 5 or 50% effort, and then a few minutes stretching. Doing as I suggested to treat muscle soreness is also what helps to prevent it by warming up the muscles and getting blood flowing to them. Once this is complete you can exercise properly.

Another bad habit is to finish exercising and then immediately return to no activity, leaving the body and muscles full of lactic acid and other waste products. Repeating the warm up routine, at this stage better known as a cool down or warm down, will help the body deal with these toxins and of course, help prevent DOMS.

If you're new to exercise or returning after a long break, remember that your body needs time to adapt to it by strengthening your muscles and getting more efficient at dealing with the resulting toxins. But it will only do this if the exercise is regular - in other words at least 3 times a week, every week. Also, while I'm usually the last person to tell people not to train hard, until you and your body get used to exercise don't push yourself too much. Increase your effort gradually over the first 6 weeks.

As I said earlier though, even a professional athlete can suffer from DOMS if he trains intensely, so don't be disheartened if you wake up a bit stiff the day after a workout. If you're warming up and cooling down properly, stretching, and training regularly but still get sore, at least it shows you're working hard.