Simple Tips for Sore Muscles

Sore muscles or Delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) is a condition of the muscles that includes their stiffening, pain, and swelling. It usually appears a day after exercising and can last up to 72 hours. Muscle soreness differs from chronic muscle inflammation, which can point out at an autoimmune disease, such as multiple sclerosis or lupus. When exercising, muscle soreness can appear because of one of the three groups of reasons. The first one is tired muscles. In this case, muscle pain can appear during training and experts’ advice is to stop exercising or engage another muscle group. The second group of reasons represents unusual activities. Those are activities that engage the muscles we do not tend to use frequently. And the third group consists of movements and exercises that are part of our regular workout, but we make them longer or repeat them more than usual. In any case, when it comes to muscle soreness, we are not concerned too much with its reasons but are more interested in tips on alleviating pain. In that sense, the article “How to Make Sore Muscles Feel Good” gives us some simple tips for sore muscles?

1. Rest the affected muscles from overly strenuous effort for 24-48 hours after the exercise that caused soreness.

2. Get a massage. When you exercise to exhaustion, tiny tears occur in muscle fibers. The body’s natural response to these tears is inflammation. Massage helps
reduce the amount of cytokines the body produces, which play a role in inflammation.

3. Stretch the muscles out. This will also help to get the lactic acid out of your muscles.

4. Ice the muscle indirectly. Doctors recommend icing the muscle or muscle groups immediately after activity to reduce inflammation and provide more lasting
relief.

5. Apply heat. After the first day of soreness, heat can be used to help blood flow to the muscle. This will help rebuilding take place and provide some
soothing relief.

6. Take pain medications such as NSAIDs. NSAIDs, or nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, come in various forms. Ibuprofen (Advil, Motrin), naproxen (Aleve), or
aspirin are all commonly-used NSAIDs.

7. Plan a proper diet including keeping hydrated.

8. Avoid soreness before it happens. Consider taking vitamins, antioxidants, and other supplements. This will help prepare your body for a more strenuous
version of the exercise.

Fitness experts do not recommend overexertion when exercising and getting painful muscle soreness. It can lead to injury and further complications. What they do claim is that we can be sure that our training is good if a day after we get sore muscles. Sore muscles are completely natural body response, wherein our muscles and tissue try to adapt and help us gain strength. After every episode of muscle soreness, our body becomes stronger, and the related pain lessens in its intensity and disappears quickly. In this way, not only that our muscles get their stamina, but our connective tissue strengthens and becomes more flexible.