Sore from Training? Is there actually anything that can help?
Ah, good old DOMS…
No not the best kind, the one that comes in a cardboard box, steaming hot and slathered in cheese…
Instead, I’m talking about:
- Delayed
- Onset of
- Muscle
- Soreness
The kind you feel after a training session, that has you struggling to go up the stairs or sit down on the toilet for 3 days afterward.
Long since thought of as the ultimate sign of a great workout, it certainly helps you know what you’ve just worked.
Unfortunately, due to the wide number of reasons why DOMS can occur, it isn’t really a sign of anything in particular…
Instead, it’s merely a simple byproduct of engaging in exercise that is different from what we’ve recently been doing.
STEP 1: Different exercise stirs up “something”, creating discomfort
STEP 2: The immune system reacts to that with inflammation, and suppresses it over 2–4 days
STEP 3: When you next do the same thing your immune system is ready for it and is in a better position to deal with it quicker next time.
So what can we do about it?
Foam Roll?
Massage?
Hot Baths?
Cold Baths?
Vibration Guns?
I’m afraid not…
“Medical science can barely even explain DOMS, let alone treat it — it seems to be nature’s little tax on exercise, which everyone must pay. There are no shortcuts through it. DOMS is mostly untreatable, even with massage.”
(Paul Ingraham, PainScience.com)
When it comes to helping reduce DOMS, proactive prevention is actually the only thing we can really do.
What do I mean by ‘proactive prevention?’
Well, as we know that DOMS is unavoidably going to happen to some degree and that nothing, after it’s happened, really does much to alleviate it…
Instead, it falls to prevent it from being completely crippling in the first place as our only real choice.
This means:
1. Reducing the number of sets we do, at the start, of exercises that have a large combination of tension and stretch in them.
What exercises do this?
Ones where a muscle is being stretched across 2 joints.
For example, the hamstrings in a stiff leg deadlift are being stretched across both the hip and knee, the lats in a seated lat pulldown are being stretched across the hip and the shoulder, and the biceps in an incline curl being pulled across the elbow and shoulder.
2. Trying to manage stress in other areas of your life
Strangely enough, physical and psychological stressors outside of the gym can play a large part in how sore you’ll feel after a session.
Even fear of the pain of your DOMS can increase its intensity!
(Parr JJ, Borsa PA, Fillingim RB, et al. 2012)
So by making sure you are looking after your sleep, finding some time to unwind each day, and staying hydrated you’ll be going a little way towards dulling the effects to some degree.
3. Start with lower volumes of training in general and work further from failure
Remember how we said that unfamiliar exercise ‘stirs something up’ and creates an immune response to help us deal with it better next time?
Well, think of low to moderate doses of an exercise being like a vaccination to help you deal with something better further down the line.
You’ll feel shitty for a few days, but ultimately be better off for it further down the line.
But take the approach of burying yourself into the ground with training volume your first few sessions back, and you’ll be effectively vaccinating against the common cold with chemotherapy.
It’ll be far more than you need, and require a lot more in the way of recovery to come back from it.
So there you go,
I know you’re probably going to completely ignore this advice when you step into the gym, get excited, and progress to hitting 10 sets on the bench press…
But at least it’s nice to know anyway!
