Muscle soreness – it's worth suffering
Muscle soreness is perceived as muscle pain.
Muscle soreness refers to the feeling of muscle pain that appears after unaccustomed muscle strain. This pain typically sets in about 24 to 48 hours after the stress and usually disappears again after about 4 days. So you don't feel the pain immediately after the exertion. However, the repair processes in the muscle can take several weeks in this case. Muscle soreness means that the muscle has tiny micro-injuries (microtraumata). The Z-disc in the sarcomere is torn.
Although it is often said, muscle soreness has nothing to do with a build-up of lactate in the muscle. The micro-injuries mentioned above occur when the muscle fibres produce force at an unusually great muscle length. For example, when you walk steeply downhill while hiking.
Prevent muscle soreness by stretching?
Many people who train try to prevent muscle soreness by doing stretching exercises before or after strength training. Unfortunately, this will not get you to your goal. As mentioned above, these are micro-injuries. By pulling the muscle fibres apart, you will not be able to reduce or prevent muscle soreness.
Muscle soreness - good or bad?
The pain from the micro-lesions usually disappears again after about
4 days. So you don't need to worry about muscle soreness, quite the opposite. Muscle soreness leads, among other things, to an adaptation of the muscle fibre length. Your muscle will add sarcomeres in series to protect itself from such micro-injuries.
If micro-injuries occur in the muscle fibres, the satellite cells are activated. Satellite cells are muscle stem cells that play an important role in muscle building. They begin to multiply through cell division and form new cell nuclei, which can be incorporated into the existing muscle fibres. A greater number of cell nuclei is positive for muscle growth – after all, the blueprint for new muscle protein is packed in the cell nucleus in the DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid).
