Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness - DOMS

Since Christmas, there seems to be a great deal of us posting (and moaning like my husband) about the aching sore muscles you get when you go back to exercise after a long rest, or even when you try a new kind of exercise. Don’t get me wrong, this pain is pretty bad! Even though it didn’t feel that bad when you were exercising or the day after, the burning searing pain that follows can be enough to put anyone off exercise...... 

So here is a breakdown (excuse the pun) of why your muscles ache to the point that you may whinge out loud walking down steps.....and, how you can help yourself ease the pain that doesn’t happen immediately, feels fine when you are sting still but makes you moan in agony any time you try and move – or even just touch your sore muscle........

Muscles are made up of long fibres of protein links. When you stress these links, they grow stronger by creating more links through muscle bonds..

Our muscles contracts in two ways – with gravity and against gravity.  It is called a positive or “concentric”  contraction when the muscle pulls. For example, lifting a weight in a bicep curl, standing up from a squat or lifting phase of a sit-up.  Under a concentric contraction, the muscle fibres pull together and shorten.  When the muscle then lengthens under tension it is called a negative or “eccentric” contraction.  This is all about controlling the weight that you are lowering towards the ground so the lowering of a squat, the lowering of a chest press or even running downhill. This controlled lowering is all about the control we have when moving.  Muscles never push. They only pull.  The return phase of the movement can be likened to lowering a person over the cliff on a long rope...

DOMS seem to occur most when the eccentric action of the muscle contraction is highly activated.   It is believed that the soreness felt  arises from microscopic tears of the muscles fibres. Although there does not seem to be any link between the amount of tearing and the amount of pain. DOMS generally happens when you try a new type of exercise, or return to exercise following some time off, or even when you make your current workout harder.

The good news is that once you have had DOMS with a new exercise or increased intensity then the body readily adapts to this and changes so quickly that you are unlikely to feel that sore again.  Further, whilst exercise at this point is far from your mind, it appears that doing even more exercise the following day actually helps recovery. This  “exercise induced analgesia”  is commonly seen in endurance exercise such as running, cycling or swimming where a “recovery run” can help the following day – that is, if you can face it. Although we do get strong DOMS from weight training, heavy exercising won’t help with this, but certainly other exercises will or even doing light weights.

Massage has been shown to help recovery and more recently the use of compression garments seems to have a positive effect not only on the recovery of muscles, but also to help prevent DOMS when wearing them to exercise – unfortunately though, compression tights won’t make you run faster....

Including protein in the recovery phase can help and you need to do this pretty sharpish after exercise for maximum benefit and have extra protection by consuming protein before your workout. Weirdly, using anti inflammatory pain killers has been linked with extending the pain of DOMS as it interferes with muscle recovery. But hot baths or ice baths do seem to help.

Doing a warm up and stretching beforehand seems to have little impact on the amount of DOMS you will get. DOMS is just strongly linked to the type of exercises – that eccentric phase we talked about.  Stretching afterwards, although feeling good and well worthwhile, still won’t protect you from DOMS sorry.

So, it looks likely that if you are new to exercise, started training after a break at Christmas, or even starting to increase your training, then you are likely to DOMS.  Although this will affect your exercise performance in the short term, one bout of DOMS can create some adaptations to your muscles that will have a protective effect on future workouts.  Build up your training gradually and go out and buy some compression tights....x