We answer one of the most popular questions about amateur sports.
Short answer : You can, but why? If you feel an irresistible urge to go to the gym, at least try not to overload the muscles that have not yet recovered. In addition, you must be sure that the pain is caused by muscle growth and not injury.
Soreness, or delayed onset muscle pain syndrome, is a common condition that athletes typically experience for some time after exercise. For a beginning athlete, discomfort can last up to five to seven days. For an experienced person, muscles usually ache only after super-intense training. Usually pain does not occur immediately: it can only come on the second or third day after training. This is fine.
Why do muscles hurt?
Krepatura is traditionally associated with the accumulation of lactic acid in muscle tissue. In this case, the acid, or rather its breakdown products, is eliminated from the body within a maximum of 72 hours. The causes of further pain are still not fully understood, but most researchers agree that the burning sensation can be caused by damaged cell membranes, which are formed as a result of micro-tears in muscle tissue and are gradually eliminated from the body. In any case, these processes are natural and not dangerous, and therefore in themselves cannot be an obstacle to training.
It should be remembered that muscle pain can also be caused by injuries - sprains or tears. And if an athlete’s pain threshold is high enough, he may not pay attention to this pain. If you see a bruise or swelling on the body, you must stop training, and if necessary, if the swelling does not subside and the pain does not go away for a long time, consult a doctor.
Is it possible to exercise if your muscles hurt after training?
Muscle pain after training is known to everyone who started playing sports after a long break, or changed the program or type of physical activity. This kind of pain is called “soreness.” It was previously believed that its cause was muscle acidification, but scientists soon refuted this assumption. What causes sore throat and is it possible to play sports if muscle pain does not go away?
What is muscle pain like?
Sports-related muscle pain comes in three types: traumatic, burning during exercise, and delayed muscle pain (soreness).
Traumatic pain is acute and occurs during or after training. It is usually described with the words “pulled a muscle” or “strained a ligament.” If you experience such pain, you must urgently complete the workout, relieve the pain syndrome, give yourself a complete rest from training, and, if necessary, consult a doctor.
A burning sensation occurs during physical activity due to the accumulation of lactic acid in the muscles, the concentration of which increases with each muscle contraction. For example, you perform biceps curls and feel a burning sensation in your muscles (calorizer). Towards the end of the approach it reaches its peak. After finishing the approach, you rest, and the burning goes away. Such pain is a natural reaction of the body.
Krepatura is a pain syndrome that occurs the next day after training. During sports, myofibrils rupture in the muscle fiber - the cells become inflamed and retain water. Water puts pressure on nerve endings and causes pain. To heal microtraumas, the body produces hormones and actively synthesizes protein. With each subsequent workout, the pain dulls and the muscles become stronger.
Is it possible to train with sore throat?
Whether to exercise with muscle pain or not depends on the intensity of the pain. If you have severe sore throat, training is not recommended. Firstly, sports should lead to progress, and not to pain and fatigue, and secondly, if unrecovered muscles are given another portion of excessive load, this will lead to overtraining or even the death of muscle fibers. It is necessary to find a middle ground between the need to receive microtraumas for further growth and normal well-being.
Use a 10-point scale to rate your readiness for training, where 0 means you feel no pain and 10 means the maximum intensity of the pain. If it hurts slightly - 3-4 points, then good - go train. If the pain is worse - 5-6 points, that’s also good, you can go to training (calorizator). And if you rate the pain as 7 points or higher, then rest or change the type of physical activity. You can exercise the muscles that don't hurt or do cardio. It is strictly forbidden to repeat the previous workout and load damaged muscles.
Krepatura is the case when too strong sensations and their complete absence are bad, and moderate sensations are good. After 2-3 weeks, you will adapt to the loads, increase your level of fitness, and instead of strong soreness, you will only have a pleasant heaviness.
Ways to reduce muscle pain
There are ways to reduce the intense pain experienced after exercise. Various warming procedures will help you cope with sore throat:
- Warm bath with sea salt;
- Warm shower;
- Massage and self-massage.
Physical activity reduces the intensity of muscle pain:
- Having a warm-up before training and stretching at the end;
- Light stretching on a day of rest from sports;
- Moderate intensity cardio.
All of the above methods are aimed at increasing blood circulation in the muscles, which helps to recover better.
All people have different adaptation capabilities. Trained people recover faster than beginners and feel soreness less often. Someone who trains a muscle group twice a week is less likely to experience long-term pain than someone who exercises their muscles once a week. Pain does not always lead to growth, and in some cases it even interferes with recovery.
Author: Ekaterina G., nutritionist, fitness blogger (especially for) Copying this article in whole or in part is prohibited.
How to exercise if your muscles hurt?
If there is no injury, but your muscles hurt and you want to train, you should adhere to the following recommendations:
1. Try to alternate workouts on different muscle groups to give them more time to recover.
2. Be sure to do a good warm-up before training. It is important to warm up all muscle groups to reduce pain.
3. If pain prevents you from maintaining correct posture, stretching between workouts will help. If your body still doesn’t listen to you, it’s better to give up training - otherwise you risk getting injured.
4. If the pain doesn't go away within a few days (for example, if you're new, you've had a long break from training, or you've started a new weight program), reconsider your training plan: increasing your training frequency and even lower reps will help.
5. Cooling down and stretching will help reduce the time it takes for lactic acid to be removed from the muscles; devote time to them in the final part of the workout.
6. Pay attention to your diet: prolonged muscle pain may indicate that your body does not have enough nutrients to effectively repair tissue.
And most importantly: remember that pain is not a sign of effective training. If you exercise regularly and eat right, your body will gradually adapt to the stress and the pain will go away. In the future, increase the load gradually, and evaluate the effectiveness of the program according to objective criteria - growth of muscle mass, endurance and reduction of body fat.
Is muscle pain worth enduring?
Some sports and fitness enthusiasts find muscle pain pleasant: for them, it is evidence that they have done a great job. If the pain does not cause you much discomfort, then it can be tolerated. You should take action only if discomfort throughout your body greatly bothers you. By the way, if after training you do not experience muscle pain at all, this may mean the wrong approach to exercise. The load is probably too weak and too familiar for your body.
Pain after training
Delayed muscle pain, or soreness, is a phenomenon familiar to everyone: even if you have never been to a fitness club, you could feel it after working in the garden or doing general cleaning. As the name suggests, it does not appear immediately: usually everything is fine for the first 6-8 hours, and then the discomfort begins to slowly increase, and reaches its maximum 1-2 days after training. In the mild version, you just feel all day long that you have muscles: they remind you of themselves with a weak pulling sensation with every movement. With severe sore throat, you literally cannot move. You cancel everything and choose the softest bed in the house to lie under a warm blanket and suffer. If you are prone to reflection, then, lying in bed, you ask fundamental questions about what to do and who is to blame: what is the nature of muscle pain, are such manifestations normal after training, is it possible to reduce the manifestation of unpleasant symptoms. As soon as you feel a little better, a fourth important question appears: is it possible to exercise with sore throat? Let's try to figure everything out in order.
What's happening?
If you have ever been interested in the problem of muscle pain, then you will probably answer that its cause is the accumulation of lactic acid (lactate) in the muscles. In the 20th century, this particular point of view was generally accepted. But modern techniques have made it possible to more thoroughly analyze the biochemical processes occurring in the muscles. It turned out that lactic acid formed during training is quickly removed from muscle fibers and enters the liver. So by the time a person begins to feel muscle pain, there is already a little lactate in them - no more than if he had not trained at all. Today, most experts are inclined to believe that pain after training is caused by microtrauma of muscle fibers.
Expert commentary
Viktor Seluyanov, professor of the Department of Physical Culture and Sports at MIPT:
“Immediately after training, the muscles do not hurt very much, but under a microscope you can see that there are burst myofibrils, that they are simply torn. Damaged myofibrils begin to gradually lose their shape. In the area of injury, many lysosomes appear, which destroy these areas. Many charged molecules are released, to which water attaches. There is not enough free water in the muscle cells, and additional fluid enters from the intercellular space. Muscle fibers begin to grow in size, turgor appears. The muscle seems to be full. What do athletes call this? Muscle congestion. The cell membranes are very stretched, and pain receptors sit on the membranes, which is why a person feels pain. And then, within 3-4 days, what is destroyed is completely destroyed, only amino acids remain. The free radicals gradually disappear and the pain begins to go away.”
What is destroyed must eventually be restored. This is exactly how the process of muscle hypertrophy (growth) works. The muscle fibers thicken as they recover from the tear and become stronger.
There are other theories that explain the occurrence of muscle pain after exercise: the theory of enzyme outflow, the theory of excess metabolic products, the theory of inflammation, the theory of connective tissue damage, the theory of muscle spasms. Most likely, as often happens in biology, several different factors contribute to a greater or lesser extent.
Causes of pain
So, why do muscles hurt after some workouts, but not after others? And why do they hurt at all?
Let's start with the very basics
Muscle pain after exercise occurs due to microtraumas occurring in muscle tissue. These are small tears in response to load. Then these tears heal and the muscles increase in size. This is an absolutely normal physiological process.
But why do muscles hurt after some exercises, but not after others? Or, for example, during one workout your muscles hurt, and after exactly the same workout, but a week later, they stopped hurting? The fact is that microtraumas in muscles appear only in response to a load to which the muscles are not yet accustomed. They didn't adapt.
For example, you have always squatted 30kg for 15 reps for 3 sets. And then suddenly they decided to push themselves and do 35 kg 3x15. Or 30 kg, but 4x15, or 3x20. In general, we increased the load. The muscles are not yet accustomed to such a load and, as a result, micro-tears appeared.
In general, only under the influence of a load to which your muscles have not yet had time to adapt do microtears and pain occur. Such microtraumas are the only cause of pain after training.
This is why the longer you exercise, the harder it is to make your muscles hurt. Because they are becoming more and more trained.
