After a hard workout with weights, your body can feel like you ran a hundred miles uphill through ankle-deep sludge.
You’ll feel the burn in your muscles and sometimes, it can reach the point to where you might start wondering why you even keep going. But there’s relief at hand for you for those times when your muscles hurt after a workout.
Free Report: The Best Type of Weights for Your WorkoutWhy Your Muscles Hurt After a Workout
Repetition is what strengthens muscles and causes them to grow. But, there is a downside to the repetitive moments. When you build muscle, it’s putting pressure on the muscles, regardless of what kind of workout you’re doing. Using this repeated pressure is what you have to do if you want to see changes in strength as well as a visible difference in your body shape.
This force is what created the pain that you feel. Though the pain doesn’t last for a long time, it’s why your muscles hurt after a workout. It’s called delayed onset muscle soreness – otherwise known as DOMS. It’s doing the muscle building exercises over and over again that will trigger the pain. The pain is caused because your muscles get to the point where they reach their max capacity to handle the exercise.
What some people do is once they reach their max capacity, they pull back. If you’ve reached the muscle size and strength that you want, pulling back will keep you at the size that you currently are right now. However, if you want to actually build the muscle, you have to push past your max capacity and that’s when the pain comes. After the workout is over, your muscles will reach a level of fatigue that they didn’t have before you started the workout.
Going Beyond Your Comfort Zone
During the muscle building process, you went through the repetitions designed to build muscle, and in that time, you had to take the muscles beyond their current comfort zone. This pain is associated with the stress placed on the muscles during the building phase, but it’s especially noticeable if you’re new to muscle building. You’ll also experience this pain if you’re starting a workout that you’ve never done before or if you’re adding new repetitions to a building routine that you currently have.
What happens when the pain hits is that some people assume one of two things. They assume that they did the workout wrong or they assume that they overdid the muscle building, and so they back off or stop for a few days. The majority of pain isn’t associated with an incorrect workout or with overload. The muscles are changing due to the muscle building regimen and any time there’s change in the muscle formation, you’re going to feel it.
While it can be painful and make you wonder what’s going on if you’re new to it, pain after a muscle building session doesn’t mean that something’s wrong. In fact, it might mean you’re doing everything right.
Treating Sore Muscles From Your Workout
If your muscles hurt after a workout and you’re hoping to build your mass, the very worst thing that you can do is to stop working out. By not using the muscles, you can actually cause the pain to linger. It’s okay, however, to dial back the intensity of your workout for a day or so, but you don’t want to stop altogether.
When you keep on working out, pushing through the pain, your muscles will warm up and provide you with relief from the soreness that you’re experiencing.
Treatment with Ice
You can use ice to treat any sore muscles you might experience from your workouts. Traditional treatment calls for placing ice on the area that’s causing you pain. However, you can also take an ice bath. This treatment is favored by athletes and involves sitting in an ice bath for no longer than five minutes. The coolness of the temperature reduces the inflammation in the muscles and gives you relief from the pain.
Treatment with Heat
On the flip side of using cold methods to treat sore muscles, you can use heat. With this method of treating sore muscles, you can apply a heating pad directly to the area that’s causing you to feel pain. One of the items that you can use to apply heat is a heating pad or a rice heating bag that you can heat up in the microwave. You can also use heat wraps. You can find these that are made to fit specific areas of the body such as the arms, wrists, shoulders, back, neck, knees and ankles.
Treatment with Medication
Anti-inflammatory medication can also be used to help treat the sore muscles you might encounter after a workout. The medicine works by lessening the inflammation that you might have in the muscle that can contribute to the pain. You can take these types of medication by mouth or you can use them topically through the use of anti-inflammatory patches that can be applied directly on the skin right over the sore muscle.
Sometimes, a massage can also help to reduce or eliminate the pain you’ll feel from sore muscles. A massage is known to reduce inflammation in muscles. Plus, getting one can give muscle recovery a boost.
How To Avoid Muscle Soreness
While treatment is an option for you, it’s best to avoid soreness as much as possible simply because it’s not fun. You can avoid most soreness if you make sure that you don’t stick too long with one muscle building routine. When you stick with one routine for too long, your muscles aren’t acclimating to any change. So when you do change, you end up sore because you’re putting new stress on your muscle.
It’s best to change up your routine with a variation exercises, rather than getting too comfortable with one. Most muscle soreness isn’t anything you need to be concerned about. However, if the soreness is so much that it prevents you from doing your day to day activities at home or at your job, then it’s possible it could be an injury rather than simple soreness.
Free Download: How To Choose The Best Weights For Your Workout
Some people shy away from using weights since they think it will make them get bigger rather than smaller. But using weights will help you to tone up and can actually help to burn more calories during resting times. The best way to do weight training exercises is to use a variety of weights. To help you choose the right weights for your workout download my free report, How To Choose The Best Weights and get the best results from your workout.
