Muscle Soreness

[Joel Nunez]

[QUOTE=StandBy]Any tips on how to reduce muscle soreness after lifting weights?

Try drinking more water during the day. Soreness after excercise often comes from dehydration.....

[Mike1986]

What you're experiencing is called Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS) it's perfectly normal and beneficial to be experiencing this. Unfortunately, the only thing that cures DOMS is time and that all depends on how much muscle fiber you recruited and ripped during the exercise, how used to this workload your body is and the size of the muscle. Generally the biceps heal the fastest and the lower lumbar region heals the slowest.

There are 2 types of muscle fiber- Type I and Type II otherwise known as red and white, fast and slow twitch muscle fibers. In order for the muscle to be effectively worked you must recruit all of the red and white fiber since your muscles grow on an all or nothing basis. If you're very sore and DOMS has set it...take it as a good sign that you have recruited the necessary fibers :-)

[Whitebear]

i dont think that creatine would help you right now, you are beginner meaning that you just started your training. give the time to your muscle to work a bit..... they wont grow a lot and dont be lesse sore just in the first couple weeks.


creatine is good when you got a plateau and that you can not increase anymore....... but on the other hand I agree that glutamine could help at the limit... if you want to take supplements, proteines is i think hte best hing that you could consume.

[BigDan824]

People vary widely in their recovery abilities. Some genetically gifted people could do 5 sets of squats to failure and have no problem recovering, but most people can't. It's safer to assume you're on the weaker end of the spectrum (like me) until you know your own body better.

My goal with every workout is to work my muscles the bare minimumnecessary to ensure growth. For me, that means exactly one set to failure of whatever exercise. One set and I'm done with that muscle group. If I do one set of squats to positive failure and then follow that up with other quadricep exercises, I'm overtraining. I'm making myself more sore than necessary and almost guaranteeing that I won't grow at all.

I wasted almost two years overtraining and not growing, not getting bigger and stronger, before I figured this out. Overtraining is a death sentence. It's my worst enemy. With strength training, it's always better to err on the side of less exercise and more recovery time. As soon as I figured that out, I put on 80 pounds of muscle.

So that's my advice, if you want it: give your whole heart on one set and then be done with that muscle group. You may figure out that your body can withstand more than that, and if that's the case, you can gradually add more exercise until you get a feel for where your body's overtraining line is.

You want to get *pretty* sore (not extremely sore), and then you want to do everything in your power to make the soreness go away as fast as possible. If you do one hard set, then follow it up with stretching, glutamine, vitamin C, a lot of protein, loads of water, and as much rest as possible, you should accomplish that.