As infants grow rapidly, do they experience continuous muscle soreness much like adults after a workout?
In: 5
Not really.
The soreness in muscles when you work out comes from micro tears in the muscle fibers as you’re putting strain into the muscle. This stimulates the muscles to heal and regenerate and over time is part of the process that builds the muscle tissue and strength of the muscles.
But growing muscle tissue as part of normal growth doesn’t work exactly the same way. While your muscles will grow and add in overall mass like in working out, normal growth doesn’t include the micro tears. So it shouldn’t be painful in this way.
Although people do tend to report pain/soreness when in growth spurts. But that’s typically when you’re older as an adolescent. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of in facts feeling pain to do normal growth.
im not sure about infants, but children do have growing pains often. i vividly remember from preschool till my early teens, i would be woken up in the middle of the night crying due to growing pains in my legs (or thats at least what i was told they were)
Different growth mechanisms: When adults work out, especially with resistance training, they create micro-tears in their muscle fibers. The body then repairs and reinforces these fibers during rest periods, making them stronger and larger – a process that can cause soreness or discomfort. Babies, on the other hand, grow through a process of cell division and expansion that is fundamentally different, and less likely to cause this kind of discomfort.
Proportion of growth: While babies do grow rapidly, the growth is spread out evenly over their entire bodies and over a significant period of time. This is different from the targeted, intense stress that adults put on specific muscles during a workout.
Resilience of young tissues: Babies and young children have bodies that are generally more flexible and adaptable than adults’. Their tissues, including muscles, can accommodate rapid changes better than adult tissues can.
Communication limitations: It’s also important to note that even if infants did experience some discomfort from growing, they wouldn’t be able to communicate it in the same way adults do. Therefore, our understanding of what they might feel is somewhat limited.
Built-in rest and repair time: Babies spend a lot of time sleeping. Sleep is when our bodies grow and repair themselves, which is why adults often feel less muscle soreness after a good night’s sleep following a workout. The ample amount of sleep that babies get could help alleviate any potential growing discomfort.
All that said, there are certainly times when rapid growth may cause discomfort or pain in children, like during growth spurts in adolescence (commonly referred to as “growing pains”), but this is a different scenario from the regular growth seen in babies.
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