Whether you find yourself holding on to both railings as you drag yourself up a flight of stairs, or you're barely able to raise your arms up over your head to brush your hair, or even worse, you find yourself trying to hold on to anything. As you lower yourself down to the toilet seat, the causes always the same muscle soreness, and even though we can try to tough it out and ignore the pain we feel while recovering from a very difficult workout, muscle soreness can really get in the way of our lives. When you're really sore. Not only do you become less functional with simple day to day tasks like sitting down and standing up, but you also wind up delaying your next intense workout session, because you need to take action days off to fully recover. And this can definitely slow down your progress because training frequency or the amount of days per week that you can once again break down an already repaired muscle is a very important factor that contributes to your overall results. And even if you do force yourself to exercise while your muscles are sore, chances are very high that you won't be able to perform at a high enough intensity making it more difficult for you to progressively overload your workouts once again slowing down your progress. So in today's video, I want to go over the five best ways to relieve muscle soreness as fast as possible so you can get back to living your life without feeling like you're handicapped, and so you can perform at your best during all your workouts. The first thing that most trainers and most experts will tell you to do is to stretch the muscles that you've just work immediately after your workout. This has been considered by many people to be your first line of defense against soreness. And even though you definitely should stretch after every workout to keep your muscles from getting tighter over time, and to prevent the risk of injury in the future. It turns out that stretching doesn't really help with soreness. A series of randomized studies suggest that whether you stretch your muscles before, after or both before and after exercise, it doesn't really produce clinically significant reductions in Dom's, which stands for delayed onset muscle soreness. foam rolling on the other hand has been shown in studies to be a lot more beneficial. So this is the first thing that you'll want to do. foam rolling is also known as self myofascial release, and it essentially allows you to give yourself a massage. Most gyms have foam rollers and if your gym doesn't have one, you can just get one for very cheap off of Amazon. But the two main goals of foam rolling is to stretch and loosen the fascia around your muscles and to decrease the intensity of sore spots found around the muscles in order to move more freely. It'll result in decreased muscle and joint pain, increased circulation and improved mobility. But it's important that you're doing it correctly for it to be effective. You'll want to start by rolling up and down the muscles that you just work. Make sure you do this slowly. When you find sore spots, stop and just sit on those sore spots for 20 to 30 seconds before continuing. You want to do this gently using your hands to support your body weight to not put too much pressure on those spots. Some people make the mistake of finding painful spots and sitting on them for five to 10 minutes at a time thinking that more is more. This is totally wrong as it can create further inflammation 30 seconds at a time is really the most you want to do before leaving that sore spot and possibly coming back to it later. You also want to spend extra time rolling out the parts of the muscle closer to where they connect your joints. Now foam rolling is something that you don't only want to do directly after your workout to help improve blood flow and circulation. But you also want to do it in between your workouts after the delayed soreness has already kicked in five minutes is usually more than enough time to roll out a whole section of your body like your legs. And even if you're foam rolling your entire body, it really shouldn't take you longer than 15 minutes. Next we have one of the best muscle soreness prevention strategies used by professional athletes as well as almost all college sports teams. But it's only for those of you that are brave. I'm talking about ice baths and cold showers. And no this isn't just some bro science. After reviewing the results of 17 clinical trials in a large meta analysis, researchers concluded that cold baths can significantly reduce muscle soreness, especially when compared to simply resting after a workout without any cold therapy intervention at all. After an intense workout, your muscles receive a bunch of microscopic tears. This leads to inflammation as the first step in the recovery process. This inflammation is there to let you know to take it easy on those muscles until they have recovered.
Just like you would apply ice to an injury to lower inflammation. jumping in an ice bath or even taking a cold shower can provide similar benefits. You can find an ice bath and most spas and bath houses. You can also make your own by simply filling your bathtub with cold water and throwing a bag of ice in there. A couple of minutes in the ice bath is all you need. If you are significantly warm before you're getting in depth Try to not exceed six to eight minutes especially if you don't have prior experience with ice baths. And ice bath is obviously not an option available for everyone. So the simplest way to use cold therapy is by just turning your shower knob down to its coldest temperature setting and then standing under the running water. When first starting this, just one minute under the cold water may feel really challenging. So try to do a couple rounds where you switch between one minute of cold water and one minute of warm water. As you do this more and more, you'll adapt and you'll be able to tolerate the cold water better for longer lengths of time. Let's move on to the third way to reduce soreness and speed up recovery and that's by eating enough of the right macro and micro-nutrients. As we all know, the amino acids found in protein are the building blocks to our muscles. Without enough essential amino acids in your diet, your muscles will take a lot longer to recover, you'll feel sore for longer and your body might even break down some muscle tissue to get those essential amino acids. So make sure you're aiming for anywhere between point eight to 1.3 grams of protein per pound of body weight, aiming for the lower end of that spectrum when you're eating enough calories to maintain your current body weight and aiming for the higher end of that spectrum when you're cutting calories to lose weight. But it's important to note that studies show that protein isn't the only thing that affects muscle recovery. fats in the form of omega three fatty acids as well as DHH, EPA and La have been linked to a reduction of inflammation and like I said, inflammation is a huge part of what's making you sore. If we can reduce it we can recover faster and experience less overall soreness. You can get omega threes, as well as DHL, EPA and a la from foods like salmon, mackerel, tuna, flax, avocados and walnuts. At the same time, you want to stay away from foods that promote inflammation like fried foods, processed meat, soda, refined carbs, and even low quality red meat. Also, research shows that fruits and vegetables are very important because diets without fruits and veggies can cause slower muscle recovery. So make sure you're getting at least a couple cups of fruits and vegetables per day. Pineapple berries, tart cherries and tomatoes can all also help reduce inflammation. Next, we want to reduce soreness by staying active. I know this sounds completely counter-intuitive to what you want to do when you feel really sore. However, by staying active, you'll increase circulation and blood flow to your sore muscles and help them recover faster. Now this doesn't mean that if your legs are sore and you can't walk up a flight of stairs, you should do some heavy barbell squats because that'll probably only make things worse if not lead to a full out injury. Instead, you want to do low intensity active recovery for those sore muscles. If your legs are sore, for example, you can try cycling on a bike for a couple minutes or you can simply take a walk or for your upper body you can do some very light body-weight movements like wall push ups and teawrex rows. A light yoga session can help as well. The key is to keep these activities light, you can still work your upper body hard if your lower body is sore in the same thing vice versa, but stick to light activities for the areas that you're experiencing soreness in to help with recovery. The last tip is to use heat to decrease your soreness. Now heat therapy can be done right and it can be also done wrong. If you start using heat immediately after a workout you'll probably wind up with more inflammation than if you just didn't do anything at all. As we already discussed right after a workout ice and cold therapy will actually help lower inflammation much more than he However, a day or two after the workout is over. When the soreness already starts kicking in a sauna steam room or Jacuzzi can help your muscles relax, loosen up and can increase blood flow to your sore muscles. assisting with the recovery process. You can also use a muscle roller stick inside a sauna or steam room to massage your sore muscles while they're relaxed to help relieve soreness a little bit more. That's it guys. I really hope this video has helped you out and that you can now experience at least a little bit less soreness and recover a little faster after your workouts are done. If you enjoyed this blog, make sure you subscribe to this channel and hit that bell icon so you can constantly be notified whenever I release more free tips and tricks just like this. Also, if you're serious about making a real transformation with no trial or error on your part, and you want a done for you approach guaranteed to give you fast results.
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