What causes the feeling of soreness after physical activity?
In: Biology
Believe it or not, we don’t really know. There is the micro damage theory but that is not proven and don’t line up with expectations. Like after aerobic activity that isn’t particularly damaging from a trauma perspective one might have severe DOMS. Someone lifting a lot of weight where micro trauma would be expected could have little to no soreness.
There is the chemical theory, that lactic acid is built up in the muscles causes the soreness, this is also imperfect because when tested people with similar levels of lactic acid had varying degrees of soreness from none to extreme.
This is one of those things that is surprising that we don’t know, the scary reality is that with all of our medical advances we know fairly little about how the body actually works.
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