Sore muscles after exercise
You've worked out hard for the health benefits it maintains. Maybe a little to hard you realize and you have a bunch of sore muscles after you completed your exercise routine. Getting sore muscles after you exercise is a problem common enough that many magazine articles and website pieces have been dedicated to it to prevent it from happening to you. Prevention is only one side of the equation, though, you must also know how to treat sore muscles after a heavy workout.
The best thing you can do for muscle soreness is to get the muscles to relax. You've either over did it or did not stretch properly before the workout. Taking pain killers may dull the pain temporarily, but over the counter medications are not necessary to achieve this goal. Apply heat to the muscles to ease the tension. This can either be through hot packs which often need to be warmed up, or by simply taking a hot bath. (The hot bath also helps you to relax and relive the stress of the day.) If it does not work, simply wait. The sore muscles that you got after you exercised should go away in a day or two.
While that covers treatment well, it is even better to take steps to prevent sore muscles after an exercise routine. This in itself is easy enough if you remember not to go by the old adage of “No pain, no gain.” Most of us are not professional athletes and our goal is not to win or even run the Boston Marathon. If the muscles start to become sore after too much exercise, stop and give them some rest. You can return to the exercise the next day and do it a little longer. If you ignore the signals from the body, you will pay for it later on, and rest gives your body time to restore and recover from strenuous activity.
The best thing you can do to prevent sore muscles is a series of stretching exercises before and after the work out. Not only does it loosen the muscles up, it also helps the body know in addition to the warm up period that you will soon put it in a state of increased activity. Because the exercise itself will cause the muscles to contract and give them more of a chance to become sore, stretching after you are done with your workout routines will prevent sore muscles after you exercise.
Prevention can help prevent you from getting sore muscles after you exercise, but there are times when we over do it or do not pay attention to the signals that our body sends us. No amount of prevention can stop the muscles from getting sore, and at that time it is far better to run some hot water and take a bath or heat up the ice packs to cause the sore muscles to loosen up. When you have sore muscles after you exercise, be sure to give your body time to rest.
