|
Let’s be honest for a moment. Why did you train your
arms the way you did last time you were in the gym? How did
you choose your movements, your repetition pattern, your training
techniques? Chances are your answer is something like, “Because
I felt like it.” So the question becomes, Are you sure
what you did was the fastest way to develop big and strong
muscles? Is there a better way to optimize your workout results?
What if you could determine more precisely which training
techniques you should use, which movements you should do,
when you should change exercises and how long you should rest
between training sessions for better recovery and growth?
It’s all possible, thanks to a physiological occurrence
known as muscle soreness.
Soreness vs. Instinctive Training
Instinctive training is very popular, but let’s look
at it objectively. The name implies that people are born with
the ability to understand the needs of their own muscles.
An animal’s instincts tell it to survive and reproduce.
That’s inborn. Similarly, a bodybuilder’s instincts
for proper bodybuilding are supposedly inborn. In other words,
we’re born with the ability to know exactly which movement
to perform, how many reps, how much time to rest and when
to change training techniques.
Some bodybuilders claim to have developed their muscles through
instinct. You may have noticed, however, that the people claiming
to get good results with that method have for the most part
had a syringe in their hand along the way.
Bodybuilding is neither instinctive nor inborn. In fact, building
muscles is something that’s learned, just as writing
or talking are learned. Unfortunately in bodybuilding we have
no teachers’ grades to tell us whether what we do to
our muscles will make them grow or shrink.
Instead, we must wait a long while before we can figure out
whether we’re training properly. And we don’t
want to wait. We want big muscles now. From what we see in
the gym, most trainees wouldn’t get good grades for
their muscle-building efforts. (That, of course, excludes
the drug users, the instinctive bodybuilders.)
Fortunately, you can use muscle soreness as your teacher,
a sensation that will allow you to quickly and precisely determine
whether your training is correct and how to improve it. Before
you can properly interpret and use the signals soreness sends,
you must understand what soreness is and what it is not.
Soreness: A Strange Phenomenon
Everyone, athlete or not, has experienced muscular soreness.
The sensation of pain is very distinctive, but what’s
even more distinctive is the way muscle soreness pops up.
When you finish working a muscle, it’s pumped, it may
even burn a little, and it’s lost strength, but it’s
not sore yet.
If you wait a bit, the blood recedes progressively from the
muscle, it no longer burns, and its strength is partially
returned, but there’s still no sign of soreness. Then,
after 24 to 48 hours, if you have trained with sufficiently
intensity, you feel it. Technically, it’s called delayed-onset
muscle soreness, or DOMS, a term that points out the delay
between the causative factor and the sensation of pain.
The Myth of Lactic Acid
The theory that soreness is the accumulation of lactic acid
originated in the 1960s, and it’s still the theory that’s
most often evoked, at least in the gyms.
All bodybuilders are subjected to an accumulation of lactic
acid during training. It’s marked by an unpleasant burning
sensation, but the sensation doesn’t resemble soreness,
neither in the type of pain it produces nor in its duration.
The burn due to lactic acid arrives and disappears relatively
quickly during training, while soreness can take days to set
in and disappear. So what miracle causes the lactic acid,
which disappears after the lift, to return to the muscle 24
to 48 hours later?
The defenders of this outdated theory generally respond that
the answer is too complicated for the average person to understand.
Try asking them this: “A week ago I trained calves with
high repetitions. They burned like never before, and yet I
have absolutely not felt any soreness. Why is that?”
I guarantee they’ll have no answer.
It’s been some years since scientists specializing in
sportsmedicine demonstrated the inaccuracy of the lactic acid
theory, but false concepts die hard, especially in the gyms.
At least now, when people cite the theory, you’ll know
something about their level of knowledge on the subject.
What Causes Soreness?
Soreness is due to microtrauma in the muscle fibers caused
by training. Unfortunately, scientists have not yet worked
out all the details of this phenomenon, but what we do know
enables us to better understand how different training techniques
affect our muscles and how long to wait before retraining
a sore muscle. In other words, understanding and controlling
soreness will allow us to be more productive and more scientific
in our training.
How do we know soreness is due to muscular microtrauma and
not to lactic acid? The most plausible explanation is provided
by the theory of microtears in the muscle due to the negative
phase of an exercise, the act of lowering the weight. Only
half of the fibers used to lift a weight are used to lower
it, so great stress is placed on each fiber involved during
the lowering phase. A few fibers cannot handle the stress,
and as a result they become slightly torn. Of course, the
muscle fibers are elastic and resistant, so the weight must
be sufficiently heavy and the negative phase sufficiently
accentuated to cause the tears.
Why doesn’t the sensation of pain arise immediately
after training? If you accidentally cut your finger, you feel
pain immediately, not 24 to 48 hours later. On the other hand,
there are shocks that do nothing at the time of the injury
but cause a great deal of pain the next day. That’s
what often happens at an automobile accident when the pain
sometimes occurs many days afterward.
It’s the same in bodybuilding. When the tension during
the negative part of the movement becomes too severe on a
small number of fibers, they’re forced to stretch in
an unnatural fashion, and some parts give way. The muscle
fibers are like a piece of tissue when suddenly stretched,
it lengthens a bit but doesn’t break. If you look closely
at a microphotograph of muscle fibers, however, you can see
that some have not suffered while others are completely torn.
Some are ripped out, and others have been stretched too violently
and have lost their initial form. The muscle still holds,
but its resistance has lessened considerably. Small fissures
appear in the cell, leading to two consequences:
1) The cell is exposed to all sorts of substances that are
toxic to it, such as calcium, as a result of those small fissures.
2) The body is forced to repair the tears, which starts an
inflammatory response.
As indicated in item 1 above, calcium, which is your best
friend during training, betrays you afterward. I’m referring
to the calcium (Ca2+) that’s found at the periphery
of muscle fibers, not the calcium in bones. When you want
to lift a weight, the brain transmits the order to the muscles
concerned by means of a small electric current. When this
current reaches the muscles, it causes Ca2+ to flow out from
the reserves in which it’s stocked, in the sarcoplasmic
reticulum. The outflow of Ca2+ causes the muscular contraction.
With the end of the electrical discharge the Ca2+ returns
to storage, and the muscle can relax. When a new electrical
charge arrives, the process begins again. The greater the
outflow of Ca2+, the more muscle fibers will be able to contract
with force and the heavier you can lift. Surely you’ve
noticed that when you’re angry, which causes a rush
of adrenaline/noradrenaline, you can lift heavier weights
than you normally can. That’s because adrenaline/noradrenaline
activates the effect of Ca2+ on the muscle fibers. You don’t
have to be angry to have such a rush, however. Incidentally,
ephedrine supplements cause an immediate increase in muscle
strength because they enhance the release of noradrenaline
and so indirectly activate the effect of calcium on muscle
fibers.
When the muscle cell is intact, Ca2+ has a positive effect
on the muscle fiber in terms of strength. When it’s
a little fissured, or torn, the Ca2+ can infiltrate it. Then
it becomes toxic to the fiber, amplifying the light damage
due to training. This phenomenon is slow-acting. At the end
of one or two days the damage inflicted on the fiber begins
to cause small pains, which increase. Now you have muscle
soreness. The inflammation and infiltration of Ca2+ occur
at the same time, and the two factors influence each other.
Not Everyone Gets Sore
Many people, women in particular, almost never experience
soreness, except perhaps the first time they weight train.
People who are somewhat immune to soreness usually have something
in common: They produce a lot of the female hormone estrogen.
Indeed, the introduction of estrogen into muscle cells gives
them a great resistance and protects them from microtrauma
caused by training. So there will be no fissures, no calcium toxicity and therefore no inflammation. Such people are able
to submit their muscle fibers to the greatest outrages yet
sustain very little damage. Nice, you say? Finally a super
anticatabolic substance!
If we take this reasoning to its logical conclusion, however,
then people who don’t experience soreness should be
huge, especially women who train intensely. Yet the result
is just the opposite. Women are smaller than men, even though
they produce more growth hormone.
The explanation for that phenomenon is found in what we know
about inflammation: It’s caused by catabolic substances
that prepare the muscle for anabolism. Therefore, without
catabolism there’s no anabolism, just stagnation. Those
who have high estrogen levels are in a constant state of stagnation
when it comes to muscle growth. What’s more, women who
take estrogen pills, including some birth control pills, grow
more slowly than those who don’t.
Soreness seems a necessary evil for muscle growth.
Related Articles
How
Can Overtraining Affect Bodybuilding
Muscle Recovery
in Bodybuilding
Overtraining and
Overreaching
| Popular Products! |
Phosphagen HP
The PHOSPHAGEN HP formula is based on university
research. PHOSPHAGEN.. |
|
Dymatize
Glutamine
L-Glutamine, the free form amino acid, is the
single most abundant..
|
|
Novedex XT
At Gaspari Nutrition, we are constantly researching
to find the very best in advanced sports nutrition. |
|
