I know many of you reading this right now workout almost daily and have goals you would like to reach. Me, like many others, love to lift and are fascinated, yet troubled by the science behind muscle growth and getting stronger.
What is being sore?
More than likely there has been a point in your life where you have been sore. Maybe during preseason, after not working out for a while, or you just did an incredibly hard work out, but what is muscle soreness?
Simply put, soreness is the pain that you feel from overworking or pushing your muscles to their limits. From a science standpoint, it sounds a little different. Soreness is when your muscle and the connective tissue surrounding it are damaged during exercise. This may sound like a bad thing, but it is actually not! This soreness actually causes hypertrophy.
So, what is hypertrophy?
Hypertrophy is building muscle, but how does that process work?
During a workout your muscle cells tear and post-workout your body will repair or rebuild those muscle fibers that were torn. To rebuild those fibers, your body will fuse your muscle fibers together, to make new fibers. These create new and large amounts of myofibril that are thicker and stronger than the original ones, making you stronger.
There is one cell, though, that is responsible for building onto the muscle in your muscle cells. It is the satellite cell. Satellite cells are cells in between two membranes of muscle fibers and many people say that they act as stem cells. On a molecular level, they add nuclei to muscle cells which makes them grow.
It is important to note that muscle cells are quite peculiar. They are multi-nucleated (have more than one nucleus) and rarely, if ever, divide. This is rare for a cell as cells are always going through mitosis and replicating. These muscle cells can not divide because they are multi-nucleated and keep growing larger. The reason why they have several nuclei (plural of nucleus) is to maximize their internuclear distances (distance between nuclei) which will make their bonds weaker which allows them to grow so large. So, you are not gaining more muscle cells, you are making your muscle cells larger.
You may have experienced a time where you could not get in the gym for a couple weeks or you had a short injury; and even in this short branch of time you could feel yourself having become weaker, although you were not visibly weaker. This can be explained by both your brain and your muscles.
To lift weights you have to be somewhat coordinated, and it takes muscle memory for you to be able to improve your coordination. In turn, this affects your movement of the weights. So, if you take some time off the good news is that you do NOT lose muscle because (as we discussed earlier) the muscle fibers you previously built are still intact, but you lose some muscle memory which is why it feels heavier to move the weights again. This can be further explained by disuse atrophy. To break it down simply, disuse means not in use, the prefix "a-" means not, and the suffix "-trophy" means nutrition/growth, so it means you do not have muscle growth from not using your muscles! From a science standpoint, when you stop using your muscles your body will not take care of your muscles because that would be wasting energy. Alternatively, your body will break down these muscles causing you to lose strength.
Why are some people stronger than others?
Well, depending on the situation there are a number of answers to this question: some people work out more often, some people work out harder, and some people just have better genetics. So, the simple answer to this question is genetics and there are several studies to support it. With this in mind, if you are interested in getting stronger, knowing your genotype (the genetic makeup of an organism) can help you understand your body and know what types of workouts you should do to achieve your goals. You may even have different genotypes than your relatives, so if you are doing the same workouts as your sibling and not seeing improvement like they are, the likelihood is that you have different genotypes in your muscle cells and all cells!
What can you do before and after exercising to make you less sore?
Although soreness can make you feel accomplished, there are certain times (game day) where you do not want to be sore because it can limit your performance. Luckily, there are ways to reduce soreness and in turn they also lower your risk of injury.
Warming up/cooling down and stretching are both incredibly helpful ways to reduce soreness and risk of injury. Warming up allows your muscles to get ready for what is next by increasing the blood flow in them. Cooling down helps with heart rate, blood flow, and blood pressure.
Another way you can reduce your soreness is by not doing hard workouts, heavy weights, or high reps. Also, using improper technique can make you sore because you might start targeting muscles you did not mean too, so you did not warm those muscles up properly.
More things you can do are drink a sufficient amount of water, ice your muscles, take an ice bath, use the heating pad on your muscles, and/or take a hot shower. Drinking water is important for your all around health, but when it comes to muscles, water is important for energy, loosening of joints, and limiting dizziness, tiredness, and headaches. Icing your muscles is good for decreasing inflammation and pain. On the opposite side, heating your muscles is good for reducing pain, healing damaged tissue, and reducing muscle tension.
To put this all together, when not working out for a little while, you do not lose strength, you lose muscle memory. The journey of getting stronger is different for everyone. There are ways to reduce your soreness, but you can not make it disappear entirely. Lastly, soreness is good and leads to hypertrophy; no pain, no gain.
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