One of the key conditions for achieving results in fitness and other sports is recovery. It involves returning your physical condition to normal and adapting to upcoming stress to improve your fitness. Lack of balance between intense training and rest negatively affects athletic performance. Over the long term, this can lead to a plateau or reverse effect, poor health, muscle pain, and decreased productivity. To avoid loss of strength and not worsen athletic performance, you need to recover effectively after exercise. We will tell you in this article how to do this quickly and correctly to increase the functionality of the body.
Types of muscle pain
- Moderate muscle pain.
Occurs immediately after classes. Its appearance is explained by microtraumas and excess lactic acid in the muscles. This muscle pain is quite mild. - Delayed muscle pain
. Muscles begin to ache a few days after exercise, most often on the second day. This severe muscle pain prevents the muscle from contracting fully. It usually occurs with very intense training in beginners without a period of adaptation to the load, as well as with too much emphasis on eccentric loads (muscle stretching when lowering weights). - Muscle pain from injury.
First sharp, then aching, constraining, aggravated by the slightest load or sudden movement. In addition, it may be accompanied by swelling and hyperemia of the damaged area. Regardless of the nature of the injury, in such cases it is necessary to consult a doctor. The most serious injuries characterized by this type of pain are muscle rupture, nerve compression, joint damage, etc.
How to relieve muscle pain
To relieve severe pain, doctors at the Yusupov Hospital use narcotic analgesics. These drugs target opium receptors in the pain center of the brain. Since such drugs can be addictive, doctors prescribe them only during severe muscle-joint pain that is not relieved by other drugs.
To prevent the patient from developing addiction to the drug, narcotic analgesics are taken in a short course. They are combined with painkillers and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. Promedol and tramadol are used in tablet form for muscle pain.
At the Yusupov Hospital, to relieve muscle and joint pain, they use the latest medications that can act on the opioid receptors of the brain, but are not addictive and do not have a psychotropic effect on the body. The effect of their use for muscle pain is similar to the effect of narcotic analgesics. Painkillers with opioid effects include nalbuphine.
How to get rid of muscle pain?
Muscle pain from training, including in the legs, is a transient phenomenon. And it’s easy to deal with by following a few rules.
- Balanced diet.
The body of a person engaged in training must necessarily receive proteins, carbohydrates and fats. The calorie content of dishes directly depends on the metabolic rate, health status and training goals. If there is a lack of nutrients, the body will not be able to fully recover after exercise. - Drinking regime.
Getting enough water into the body helps eliminate toxins that negatively affect muscle recovery after intense physical activity. - Contrast shower and cold compresses.
They help eliminate muscle pain and fatigue. It is worth considering that a contrast shower involves alternating cool and warm water, rather than hot and ice. - Massage.
Helps improve blood circulation, resulting in more oxygen and nutrients entering the tissues, and at the same time, toxins are more actively eliminated. - A complete night's rest.
Eight hours of sleep is an essential part of every athlete’s daily routine. Otherwise, the body will have an increased level of cortisol, which will negatively affect the recovery of the body and the intensity of muscle pain, which will only increase. - Competent approach to classes
. It includes a thorough warm-up, proper execution of all exercises, and a balanced training regimen. Rehabilitation exercises after the onset of pain include exercise on an exercise bike and long-distance running.
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Through pain? What to do to avoid suffering after the first workouts
Unfortunately, summer is coming to an end, which means that not only inclement weather lies ahead, but also the return of citizens to their usual, working rhythm: traffic on the roads will increase, children will go to school, and fitness clubs will be sold out.
Columnist for the Moscow 24 portal, fitness expert and TV presenter Eduard Kanevsky will tell you how to ensure that muscle pain or severe fatigue after the first workouts do not discourage you from exercising altogether (as, unfortunately, often happens).
Photo: depositphotos/lunamarina
Whether you crossed the threshold of a fitness club for the first time or returned after a long break - it doesn’t matter. The important thing is that if you haven't exercised for more than three or four weeks, consider that you are starting from scratch. True, there is a difference between people who have exercised in one way or another before and those who have never exercised at all. It lies in the fact that the first ones will see the result much earlier, because there is such a thing as “muscle memory,” plus the training experience itself will speed up the recovery process. But beginners will have to learn everything gradually: from the technique of performing this or that exercise to experimenting with different techniques that will give good results specifically for him.
But if experienced exercisers know how to properly recover so that pain in the next days after training does not turn into a test, then the following tips are relevant for beginners. They will help not only minimize post-workout pain, but also protect against injury and improve overall results.
The main problem for beginners is excessive enthusiasm. Especially if they bought a card to a fitness club, the price of which includes a swimming pool, group classes, and a gym. The client begins to joyfully conquer the Olympus of physical activity, thinking that the more he does, the better the result will be.
In fact, this approach is not only wrong, but also dangerous to health. The body, which has not trained for years, needs to be gradually introduced into a rhythm, and this means two to four workouts a week for 45-60 minutes, no more.
Photo: depositphotos/liudaboich.gmail.com
If you choose group lessons, be sure to take classes for beginners. And if you come to the gym, then, firstly, be sure to undergo initial instruction with a trainer, which is included in the price of the contract - he will give you the opportunity to learn the basic exercises in the gym. Secondly, strength training in the first two weeks should last no more than 45 minutes, and the number of exercises should not be more than five. During this period, your main task is to learn the techniques of performing exercises with a weight of weight with which you can perform 15-20 repetitions, no less. Under no circumstances work to the point of “failure” (this is a state when you can no longer do a single repetition).
It is also important to warm up and cool down before strength training. To do this, you will need any cardio machine on which you warm up your body a little for 5-10 minutes before training at an easy pace. The purpose of warming up is to prepare your body for further physical activity, which will increase the effectiveness of the workout and reduce the risk of injury.
But a more important component is the cool-down, which is also performed on any cardio machine and also at an easy pace. The purpose of a cool-down is not just to “bring down” the body from the load, to reduce the pulse, but to make sure that the next day you do not groan from muscle pain, which is a mandatory component after training, especially for beginners.
The fact is that during muscle contraction, so-called products of metabolites (decomposition) of nutrients accumulate in muscle cells (and muscle fibers). During warm-up, we accelerate the release of these substances from the muscles, which will allow the tissue to recover faster.
Photo: depositphotos/minervastock
Also, to minimize muscle pain, it is important not only to perform high numbers of repetitions with light weight, as I wrote earlier, but also to carry out some procedures that will speed up the process a little. Firstly, after training and a cool-down, you can sit in the sauna - not for long, about five minutes (if there are no contraindications). Secondly, if the pain is severe, then you need to go to the fitness club again and work out on a cardio machine, training on which will speed up blood circulation, and with it recovery.
But you need to understand that if you really overdid it and the next day you can’t get up at all, then of course you can sit in a hot bath and then force yourself to go to cardio training, but this will not be a panacea, because severe pain is a sign that you have damaged too much muscle tissue. What does it mean? During muscle contraction, at the cellular level, the protein molecules that make up the muscle fiber are “destructed,” and during the recovery process (with proper nutrition), the protein molecule becomes larger, as if in response to the load you gave during training. Actually, this explains muscle growth; in sports physiology this process is called “supercompensation”. So, if a beginner has trained excessively, then his body reacts especially sharply to such “damage”, and until complete recovery occurs, the pain will not go away. The good news is that this process usually takes five to seven days. With experience in training, the pain will be less and recovery will be faster. Therefore, neither a massage nor a hot bath can significantly help with severe pain, because this is a matter of restoration at the cellular level.
So don’t forget the popular saying: if you hurry, you will make people laugh. It can be safely applied to your training.
Kanevsky Eduard
Other drugs
What to do if you have pain in the joints and muscles if you cannot take analgesics due to contraindications? No-spa relieves spasms for muscle pain. Myotropic antispasmodics have a pronounced analgesic effect: baralgetas, renalgan, spasmalgon. Diprospan is used in the form of tablets and injections for muscle pain. Reviews about the drug are good. It has a pronounced analgesic effect.
You can relieve muscle pain with other medications. Mydocalm, sirdalud, tizalud relieve tension and muscle spasms. You can relieve muscle pain in MS (multiple sclerosis) with glucocorticoid drugs - medrol, methylprednisolone. Neurologists perform pulse therapy with high doses of corticosteroids, after which not only muscle pain decreases, but other symptoms of the disease also reverse. Combination drugs containing glucocorticoids and anti-inflammatory drugs have an analgesic effect for muscle pain.
Pain in the neck muscles can be relieved by massage and rubbing with ointments that improve blood circulation in the muscle affected by the pathological process (Nikoflex). For pain in the piriformis muscle, neurologists prescribe complex treatment:
- non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs;
- massage;
- therapeutic exercises;
- physiotherapeutic procedures;
- acupuncture.
If you have pain in your back muscles, call the Yusupov Hospital. The clinic’s doctors know how to treat muscle pain. Neurologists, therapists, and rehabilitation specialists work as one team. When prescribing treatment, they take into account the severity of pain, other symptoms of the disease, the patient’s age, and the presence of concomitant pathologies.
Pain relieving ointments and how they work
Most often, ointments are used to relieve muscle pain. Their range is extensive, and there is no shortage of inexpensive drugs with high efficiency. There are really a lot of names, so it is sometimes difficult for an unprepared person to make a choice. For serious illnesses, ointments are prescribed by general practitioners based on the diagnosis.
Local medications are also good because the side effects from their use are much less pronounced (or completely absent) compared to drugs that enter the bloodstream directly.
Most medicines have a warming effect. Due to the dilation of blood vessels, blood flows away from the damaged area. If swelling has formed at the site of injury, it decreases and blood circulation is restored. The inflammatory process gradually subsides, the muscles relax and the spasm goes away.
Another useful property of ointments is the switching of the nervous system’s attention to a local stimulus. I will explain this point in more detail. When severe pain occurs (and a joint injury is often quite painful), these sensations are transmitted to the brain, where a real source of pain is formed. The nervous system closes on it, and this greatly exhausts the body.
You can interrupt the unpleasant process using a local irritant. The product not only warms the damaged area, quickly absorbing into the skin, but also acts as an irritant due to the components included in its composition (derivatives of pepper, camphor, bee venom, and so on). Often this is enough to switch the nervous system.
There are also cooling medications. They do not have a pronounced irritating effect, but create a feeling of decreasing temperature around the affected area. They contain analgesics, menthol, essential oils, and anticoagulants. As a rule, such drugs are used immediately or shortly after injury, allowing you to quickly relieve pain.
Treatment results
Treatment of muscle pain is carried out in various ways. Patients are prescribed:
- acupuncture and acupressure treatments;
- electro- and physiotherapy;
- exercise therapy;
- manual manipulations.
Special exercises are especially relevant for chronic pain that is a consequence of spinal pathologies, for example, osteochondrosis, disc herniation or spondylosis. For severe muscle tissue injuries, surgical treatment methods are used.
Types and causes of muscle pain
In most cases, the cause of muscle pain is a stressful situation, excessive physical activity or overexertion. Patients diagnosed with myalgia need treatment:
- with increased muscle tension in one or more areas of the body;
- pain after intense physical activity;
- muscle injury during sports or heavy work.
Doctors also name other reasons for the appearance of pain in muscle tissue. This could be a previous infection, such as influenza or polio. Discomfort is also caused by:
- autoimmune disorders in the body;
- use of certain groups of drugs;
- insufficient level of potassium in the body;
- serious problems with the thyroid gland.
conclusions
Often ointments are the first drug with which treatment begins. Sports ointments are widely used not only by professional athletes, but also by people who regularly exercise in gyms, stadiums or at home.
Local medications quickly reduce pain, cool and subsequently warm the muscles, help the nervous system to distract from pain, remove swelling and trigger regenerative processes. Due to the nature of their use, they begin to have an effect on the affected area as quickly as possible and do not cause significant side effects.
That’s all for now, but in the following articles I will definitely tell you something important, useful and interesting.
Active ingredients in sports ointments
Surprisingly, the list of active substances widely used in numerous sports ointments, creams and gels is not as wide as one might expect. I will give the main components:
- Methyl salicylate.
- Ketoprofen.
- Diclofenac.
- Ibuprofen.
- Indomethacin.
They all do the same thing - inhibiting cyclooxygenase. Don't let this tricky phrase confuse you. We are talking about reducing pain and inflammatory symptoms. Each active ingredient does this to varying degrees of effectiveness, but ultimately reduces pain.
Other substances can be found in sports products, the effect of which is to create irritating and distracting effects. I have already mentioned that higher nervous activity must be distracted from pain. Help with this:
- Bee venom.
- Snake poison.
- Mustard and pepper extract.
- Menthol.
- Camphor.
Rehabilitation and lifestyle restoration
Patients suffering from muscle pain undergo diagnosis, treatment and restoration of the body without leaving the clinic. The Kuntsevo Medical Center has its own rehabilitation department. The success of its work is based on the availability of modern highly efficient equipment, a staff of experienced specialists, and the application of the principle of an individual approach.
The technical equipment of the clinic meets modern world standards. To restore the body after an illness, manual therapy sessions are often prescribed. Its peculiarity is its effect on tissues to ensure the normal functioning of the systems of the human body. During the procedures, restriction of joint mobility is eliminated, muscles are relaxed, and minor tissue compactions are removed. Properly performed manual therapy is gentle and completely painless.
The most popular ointments
The number of items has long been in the hundreds, and the choice is determined, first of all, by the reasons that cause pain in the muscles. I have already mentioned that the cause is first determined, and only then treatment begins.
If we talk about drugs for athletes, the most popular warming drugs include:
- Capsicam.
- Nicoflex.
- Finalgon.
- Apizartron.
- Ben-Gay.
Coolants:
- Capilar.
- Venoruton-gel.
- Sports balm "42".
- Repaired.
Homeopathic medicines include:
- Namman Muay.
- Phong Thap Thu.
- Quick Fit.
However, homeopathy is a topic for a separate discussion, and if you need a guaranteed effect, it is better to pay attention to classic cooling and warming agents.