As infants grow rapidly, do they experience continuous muscle soreness much like adults after a workout?
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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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