What To Do About Poor, Sore Muscles

What exactly is muscle soreness?  Muscle soreness can be caused by muscle damage, tissue damage, muscle spasms which results in overall micro trauma resulting in a type of cellular damage. This may be the leading cause of overtraining and being uncomfortable for a few days after training. And continual cellular damage over and over to the point where the body cannot recover can result in overtraining.

Before training, try leg elevations.  Since many of us stand or sit for long periods of time before going to the gym and training, overall circulation is less than ideal. Instead, 20-30 minutes before you train, lay down with your feel against a wall or other object and get the blood back to your upper body and heart.  You’ll improve your circulation especially when you train legs or your lower back.  After your workout, your body is in a prime time to devour nutrients. This is an ideal time to give it the protein it needs with the carbohydrates for energy recovery.  You see, if muscle soreness is caused by micro trauma resulting in cellular damage then obviously you want to give your body plenty of materials quickly to repair itself.  Proper post workout nutrition can reduce the amount of soreness you can experience.  Other ways to treat pain in your sore muscles  include massage, sauna, whirlpool, chiropractic adjustments, acupressure and others are among the more popular therapeutic modalities.

You might want to also try some back exercises for lower back pain as well, should none of the above methods manage to prevent the occurrence of post workout pain.  Somatic exercises are a new class of therapeutic/developmental exercise distinct from stretching and strengthening.  Somatic exercises greatly improve control of muscular tension and coordination, resulting in better movement and easing of spasticity and pain.

Lastly, don’t forget sleep.  Remember that this is the time your body repairs all that micro trauma so if you aren’t getting enough quality sleep, it can affect your overall recovery.