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Lead Stories: Monday, December 1, 2008

What Causes Muscle Soreness?

Posted October 27th, 2006 at 7:00 AM by Hariz Siddiqui

Section: Running & Training, Injury & Rehab, Health & Fitness, Injury & Rehab, Exercise

Your muscles should feel sore on some days after you exercise.

If you go out and jog the same two miles at the same pace, day after day, you will never become faster, stronger or have greater endurance. If you stop lifting weights when your muscles start to burn, you won’t feel sore on the next day and you will not become stronger.

All improvement in any muscle function comes from stressing and recovering. On one day, you go out and exercise hard enough to make your muscles burn during exercise. The burning is a sign that you are damaging your muscles. On the next day, your muscles feel sore because they are damaged and need time to recover. Scientist call this DOMS, delayed onset muscle soreness.

It takes at least eight hours to feel this type of soreness. You finish a workout and feel great; then you get up the next morning and your exercised muscles feel sore. We used to think that next-day muscle soreness is caused by a buildup of lactic acid in muscles, but now we know that lactic acid has nothing to do it. Read the rest of this entry »

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