Delayed onset Muscle Soreness
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When you lift weights and exercise, you create microtears in your muscles which causes that soreness. But when they heal, they come back stronger which is why people get stronger and develop more muscle mass as they lift heavier and heavier. Protein also helps with the soreness as your muscles need that to be stronger.
To the best of my knowledge, the exact reason isn’t totally understood, but the prevailing theory is that it’s because of a kind of inflammation cascade.
Basically, when you work out you’re causing tiny bits of damage to your muscles. Afterwards, your muscles will heal, and heal even stronger than before which is what helps you actually gain strength.
However, if you haven’t worked out a muscle much before your body will sort of overreact to the damage. It’ll rush a bunch of blood to the area to try and repair/remove the damaged/dead cells, and in the process start to cause damage to other surrounding cells that causes additional soreness. It’s not immediate though, it takes time for the other cells to start getting damaged, which is why it’s a delayed soreness. Your muscles are quick to adjust though, so this process gets more efficient and you’ll generally stop experiencing DOMS if you’re working out regularly.
Ah, so my muscles are just throwing a tantrum? Guess I’ll have to work them out more often to calm them down.
I read an interesting article a few years ago that theorized DOMS were caused by nerve growth. Whenever you engaged in activities that required new muscle groups your body would increase nerve growth to increase muscle recruitment. I’ve never heard it talked about it since but it made sense to me. I think this is the paper that the article was referencing, but definitely not eli5.
https://jps.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1007/s12576-015-0397-0
Basically small scabs forming on the muscle tears.
A surface scrape across the inside of your elbow can be easily bent when it’s fresh, but after waking up the next day, it’s locked into position as it’s healed a bit and needs to be painfully stretched out.
Same with your muscles, a hard workout feels fine afterwards but the next day everything has “scabbed over” and now it hurts when you move.
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