How To Prevent Soreness When You Exercise

How do I prevent soreness when I exercise?

Sometimes people wonder if the soreness from exercise ever goes away. I've been doing this for twenty-five years, and today as I sit here I'm sore. So, it's just part of what happens. It's a normal physiological response. There are two types of soreness. There's one immediate onset of soreness and that is from an accumulation of lactic acid in the body, and the body gets to a point where the acidity gets so high, neurologically the muscles just don't fire any more. That's what causes fatigue, and that's that burn you feel. That's the lactic acid. Then the day, or days following you have what's called DOMS, which means delayed onset muscle soreness. DOMS is where there are little micro-tears in the muscle. It's not a severed muscle, and it's actually a desired outcome, because that means the body has to rebuild itself when you sleep. That's why sleep is so important as well; so that those little micro-tears tell your body "Hey, I have to be able to accommodate this workload, and I want to be able to do it even better next time. So, when you rebuild these fibres, body, I want you to make them stronger, and better than ever before." Then, you get stronger; that's why you progressively get stronger, because your body says "Hey, I'm going to make sure that you can accommodate this workload." Then, you lift your weights or you do your activity, and you are able to push it a little bit further, because your body made you accommodate it. Then you get sore again, and it pushes it to the next level. That's how we gradually progress in our physical abilities.