Advanced Training Essentials Muscle pain: friend or foe? Without sufficient recovery between training sessions (which may take 4-5 days before a given muscle is again ready to be worked), we cannot expect to grow larger and stronger. Whenever a muscle is trained intensely, minute muscle tears are created (called muscle micro-trauma), causing localized inflammation. Caused by the excessive lengthening (or eccentric loading) of muscles rather than the contracting (or concentric) part of a rep, Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (or DOMS, as it is colloquially known) is one symptom of exercise-induced muscle damage (the other being acute muscle soreness, which appears during, and immediately following, training). A major goal of serious trainers is to ensure that their muscles, between workouts, adapt to the imposed training stress to prevent chronic injurious muscle damage and to minimize further soreness. Prolonged soreness following training may reflect a failure to properly recover between workouts. Thus, soreness can be used as a feedback tool to keep us eating, supplementing and resting enough so as to alleviate the pain but, more importantly, to recover and grow. The most commonly accepted muscle damage theory posits that microscopic ruptures (or lesions) within a target muscle, due to increased tension force and muscle lengthening during eccentric contractions, cause the muscle filaments actin and myosin to separate prior to relaxation, which promotes greater tension within the remaining active motor units. This tension may damage the sarcomere (the basic unit of a muscle).When this happens, pain receptors (nociceptors) contained in a muscle’s connective tissues are stimulated and sensations of pain are felt. But to provoke such sweet pain, and ultimately benefit from it, we must consistently train with high levels of intensity. About the author: David Robson is a professional freelance writer and journalist who runs personal training company Advanced Personal Training (APT), is Founder and Managing Director of Fit Futures Charitable Trust (an organisation which provides personal training options for people with physical disabilities), and Founder and President of the New Zealand Wheelchair Body Building Federation (a not for profit organisation open to all New Zealand wheelchair users).
Posted on: Sun, 30 Mar 2014 21:38:02 +0000
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