Find out if it is worth exercising if your body has not had time to recover from a last grueling training session. Many people visiting the gym are interested in how to properly train when muscles hurt. Now we are not talking about pro-athletes, but ordinary people who visit gyms to maintain good physical shape. They do not strive to set new records, but simply train for moral pleasure and psychological relief.
However, if you feel pain in the muscles, then there is no need to talk about getting satisfaction from the training. Many people are sure that if the muscles hurt after exercise, then this is evidence of a high-quality workout. However, most of them know that lactic acid is the cause of such pain. The more intense your training was, the more this substance accumulates in the muscles.
Causes of muscle pain
During the lesson and immediately after its end
During high-intensity training, you often experience a burning sensation in your muscles. Most often, it appears when performing final sets and approaches at a time when strength is already running out. The same lactic acid, which we talked about a little higher, is to blame for this.
During training, the muscles need a lot of energy, which can be obtained from glycogen. The process of obtaining it can be aerobic (oxygen is involved) and anaerobic (without oxygen). At this moment, the muscles work intensively, and oxygen does not have time to enter the tissues in the required amount. As a result, the body switches to an anaerobic process of obtaining energy, one of the metabolites of which is lactic acid.
The substance accumulates in the muscles throughout the exercise, since the bloodstream does not have time to flush it out. As a result, it begins to affect nerve cells. Irritating them, which leads to the appearance of a burning sensation. As soon as after the end of the lesson, the blood flushes all the lactic acid from the tissues, the pain subsides.
To get rid of this pain as soon as possible, you need to stimulate the blood flow. To do this, you need to relax the muscle tissue by doing stretching exercises. A warm shower and massage can also help.
The day after the training
However, a burning sensation in the muscles is not the only pain and very often the next day after training, you begin to feel pain in the muscles again. If many have heard about lactic acid, then the reason for the appearance of pain the next day is very often a mystery for athletes.
These late pain sensations appear 24 hours after the completion of the training, and then over the next day they can intensify. After that, they fall off. You are probably familiar with these pains and know that they are much more unpleasant compared to post-workout burning sensation. Very often, when this pain appears, the desire to train completely disappears.
The causes of these pains are the microdamages that you caused to the muscle tissues during the exercise. During and immediately after the completion of the training, they do not bother you, but after a day they make themselves felt in full. At this point, inflammatory processes begin to flow in the tissues of the muscles, which you should not be afraid of.
To reduce these delayed pains, you can use special ointments and give a gentle massage. Exercise is also very effective in eliminating pain. Thanks to this, you accelerate blood flow, which improves the quality of tissue nutrition, and they regenerate faster. So we come to the answer to the question - how should training be carried out when muscles hurt. It is worth doing the lesson, but the load should be reduced so as not to inflict new damage on the tissues until they are fully restored.
From injury
You definitely will not confuse these painful sensations with anything. If ligaments or muscle tissue were injured, then a sharp pain appears in the damaged area, and you will no longer be able to work with the same intensity. If you are injured, then you should immediately end the class and seek the advice of a doctor.
How is the workout done when the muscles hurt?
You may well exercise and feel pain, but you need to make changes to the training program. It is very important not to overload the body at this moment and your workout, when your muscles ache, should be light. It is very good for muscle pain to do Pilates or yoga, or just do stretching exercises. All these activities allow you to hear your body and the chances that you will overload it again are extremely small.
Is it possible to train muscles if they hurt after the last workout? See here: