why doesn’t the diaphragm muscle ever get sore, even after intense exercise?
In: Biology
You’ve never taken a way too big bong hit. Ive specifically felt pain in my diaphragm. It is different than muscle pain for sure.
Muscle soreness as a result of exercise happens because the muscle is being used in unfamiliar ways, which can cause tiny amounts of damage to the muscle. After the activity, the muscle reorganises itself to prevent the same damage from happening again. The diaphragm doesn’t get sore because its regular movement isn’t unfamiliar to it, so it already has the right layout to avoid taking damage from work. This is called delayed onset muscle soreness.
There’s also acute muscle soreness – the immediate pain felt during and after exercise. This is due to a buildup of lactic acid in the muscle. Normally, we get enough oxygen so respiration – the process by which our cells create energy from base materials like sugars, fats and proteins, happens normally, creating waste products of harmless water and CO2. However, if we don’t have enough oxygen, this process can’t be done, so the cells switch to a different function called anaerobic respiration – literally respiration without air. This process doesn’t create as much energy and also becomes a byproduct called lactic acid. Too much exercise causes a buildup of lactic acid, which is very dangerous so the body creates a pain signal to try and get you to stop exercising. This pain slowly decays over the following minutes: The cells use excess oxygen to convert the lactic acid into safer, non-acidic substances. This is why you breathe heavily after exercise – you need more oxygen to expel all this nasty lactic acid.
The heart never builds up lactic acid because it does so much work that anaerobic respiration simply isn’t worth it. The heart relies solely on normal, aerobic respiration (the kind that uses oxygen).
The diaphragm is actually mostly fibrous tissue, not muscle, and it doesn’t get sore because the body prioritises sending oxygen to it. It would kinda suck if exercise caused you to stop breathing after-all. It also gets quite a lot of time at rest since the entire exhale is just the muscle relaxing and natural elasticity of the diaphragm forcing it to return to its normal position.
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