Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness, and what can be done about it;

Right off the bat, nothing here is medical advice. You should always consult with your doctor before beginning an exercise routine. Delayed onset muscle soreness is a topic requires that warning, because it’s a symptom many experience when they first start exercising, especially after a period away.

Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS) is pain and soreness in overworked muscle groups,thought to be due to lengthening of muscles under load, especially when beginning to exercise with poor neural recruitment. Soreness is pretty self explanatory, but what is poor neural recruitment? Exercise requires communication between the brain, spinal cord and muscles (which actually perform the work of exercise). Muscle fibers respond individually to the nerves which they are nearby; there may be thousand specific muscle fibers in a muscle, but each time it contracts, only 25% of those muscle fibers actually contract. We’re unaware of the freeloading 75% each step we take while running, but a major change that happens with exercise is the number of muscles contracting each time the brain sends a signal for movement increases. This phenomena is called “recruitment”, and is the reason why when a person starts to lift weights, they make dramatic improvement at first, due to changes in their neurons and neural pathways, instead of actual muscle growth.

Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness can really cramp a training schedule for an athlete just starting out. DOMS hits you 24-48 hours after you conclude exercise. A typical schedule for an athlete would typically have a hard workout day, perhaps a day of rest, and then another exercise day; this coincides exactly with the onset of soreness for the second workout!

There are a few tricks to getting through DOMS. First, know that it won’t be forever. Typically the first few hard workouts of a new modality or type will provoke soreness, but after practicing a few times, there should be a dramatic reduction in soreness. Second, this muscle soreness should subside fairly quickly the next time that you exercise, especially with light activity to start. Give yourself a longer warm up, and within a few minutes, you should feel improvement.

If you have some foresight, you can dramatically reduce the severity of your DOMS experience. If you’ve already worked out, give yourself an extensive cool down, and roll out the muscles that you expect will be sore with a foam roller. Massage and foam rolling have both been shown to reduce the severity of DOMS. Roll the effected muscle group immediately after exercise, and 24 hours after concluding exercise. Glutamine supplements can also reduce the effect of DOMS, both perceptually (as a pain-reducer) and on the cellular level. Research has shown that 5g of the amino acid glutamine taken orally every other day, twice per day, improves perceived pain of DOMS in naive athletes beginning their exercise routine. Glutamine is an easy supplement to manage DOMS.

DOMS is a speed bump on the way to better fitness. With some foam rolling and and easy supplement, you can avoid feeling much DOMS at all. Knowing when to expect DOMS, when your training is changing such that you’re going to be improving neural recruitment, is a great topic to discuss with a coach when developing a new training plan. If you’d like to start to reach your fitness goals, send me an email at brycoward@gmail.com.