Exercise Recovery
By
Bruce W. Meleski, Ph.D.
Whether you are just beginning to exercise or training seriously for competitive racing, everyone experiences sore muscles at sometime during a training program. Recovery techniques are important to allowing you to maintain your training and RunTex Riverside will showcase Recovery Saturday on July 12th, with experts in recovery and products that can assist with physical recovery.
Improvement in muscle function is a result of stressing and recovery of the muscle, a cycle that is critical to achieving success. We must focus on recovery; otherwise, we will burn out and become fatigued. The most common symptom of training is muscle soreness, caused by muscle microfibers tearing and bleeding. When we feel the muscle burning during exercise we are creating these microscopic muscle tears, however, we do not feel the muscle soreness for about eight to twelve hours. For this reason, we cycle through training with heavy and light training days allowing our muscles to recover.
For many years it was widely believed that lactic acid, a by product of exercise metabolism, was responsible for muscle soreness. This is not true. Ten minutes of slow running at the end of training accelerates the release of lactic acid from the muscle. Muscle biopsies have confirmed the muscle fiber tears that cause the soreness and soreness is not correlated with lactic acid levels.
Intense training results in shortened muscle fibers that are torn and inflamed. Our ability to lengthen these muscle fibers will improve recovery and allow for additional training. Techniques that help muscles to relax and lengthen should be employed in recovery. These include massage and tools that assist us in lengthening the muscular fibers, as part of this approach, blood flow increases and the muscle relaxes.
The question is what is the best way to deal with this soreness and continue to train effectively? You can learn more at Recovery Saturday.
Recovery Saturday at RunTex Riverside will have experts and product demonstrations to assist you with muscle recovery. Come by between 10am and 5pm, Saturday July 12th.
