DOMS Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness

“Hey! What’s up? Today I wanted to speak to you specifically about Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (Also known as DOMS). This is when your body becomes sore after training.

So typically, the first time that you train your Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness is going to be the most severe because the training is like a shock to the body. It is moving outside of homeostasis, there are small microtraumas that happen to the muscles and the body is not prepared for what is occurring.

The good news is that this process is what makes you stronger, gain more lean muscle, and have better brain, mind-body connection. So DOMS typically occurs 24-48 hours after training. It can happen much faster, it can last much longer, but that’s the typical range.

I’ve had soreness that’s lasted me weeks before because I over did something, you know, way way too much. And I’ve also had it hit me real fast and there’s reasons to that, as well, because that’s going to be the next thing I’m talking about, which is nutrition and that’s like if we went to a whole… I could do a totally different video just on nutrition for this, but I’m just going to cover the basics. The more water you have in your body, the more cells you have in the body, the more balanced the cell is with nutrients, minerals, etc. the less soreness you’ll have, and the faster you’ll get nutrients in right after training. You have about a 45 metabolic window of time to get you know good lean protein in with a little mix of carbs so the carbs helps transport the protein to the muscles and helps the repairing process.

If you don’t have a lot of water in your body, you don’t get the nutrients you need, you don’t have the nutrients before you train, your soreness will go up. Think of it like, again, not having oil in the car, right? so rusty muscles going against each other. So, the more water you have way before your training the better, the more water you intake after, the better. Your recovery will be much better.

The eccentric phase of the movement is when the soreness occurs, that’s what creates the soreness. So when you go down on the squat, that is the eccentric phase. Right, when you’re walking down the stairs this is something that typically happens: people say, “Oh my calves are sore, it must have been from walking up all the stairs.” Well, actually, it’s from walking down the stairs because as you step your calf has to decelerate the movement and that’s the eccentric motion which creates the soreness. So, anytime you’re doing the eccentric motion, that’s where the DOMS comes from. It’s also where most injuries occur in exercise. So, starting out, you always want to go slow in control movement pattern so you reinforce the proper movement, the connection from the brain to the muscles, etc..

Now we’re gonna move on to the recovery portion. How do I recover faster from DOMS. Well you can increase the rate of recovery. Nutrition we already spoke about so the more water you have inside you before you train and after the better, so after training keep drinking more water but light activity will help increase the process; getting more blood flow, nutrients and oxygen so your blood flows and circulates, right? that’s one of the main reasons for the cardiovascular system is to circulate the blood and clear out trash.

So what you can do is something like light jogging, light stretching, or even going into a sauna and then coming out and doing light stretching. This will help flush out some of the trash, the lactic acid that has been built up. It will help get more blood flow, more oxygen and nutrients to the area that has the microtrauma and this is how the repairing process begins. And this is true for injuries like real actual injuries like a bad sprain ankle, right? People say like lifted elevated, don’t move it. It’s actually good to get your heart rate up and get the blood flow circulate through the foot not necessarily using that foot that you injured, right? so I want to make that clear you wouldn’t be walking on the foot you injured but doing others stuff like upper body or maybe the other leg on a bike will get your heart pumping the blood and flowing to help repair that injured area. So it’s the same for muscle soreness.

One of the best parts about training is if you are training and then you get injured or you go into surgery or something like that, your recovery process is about 50% better or faster because you’ve been training and you’ve put that stress on the body. Your body knows how to repair itself faster so when you get an injury or have to go for surgery, it’s much easier and better to recover. So we went over that more oxygen and blood flow you can get to the body by doing things like hot showers, going into the sauna, doing light cardio, some light stretching will help the recovery process and if you’ve seen our video on supercompensation that is specific wher,e you know, you’re going to training your body actually fatigues while training and then you recover and your body recovers at a better state, and then you can train a little bit harder and typically the soreness should go down if you’re adapting the body properly: not too intense, not too fast, not doing things too soon.

Alright, this is Ian Hart. I hope this help. Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness is typically happening if you’re training especially the first time and now you know why, now you know what to do how to recover. I hope this helps. Have a great day!”

Ian Hart is a Body-Mind Transformation expert, the creator of EarthFIT Training Systems, co-creator of BACK PAIN RELIEF4LIFE, and founder of BEAUFORTPERSONALTRAINING.COM and MYBACKPAINCOACH.COM. Ian and his team help people get into optimal shape in the safest, fastest and most effective way possible, using cutting edge science.’