How Not to Get Sick All the Time After Training
Delayed muscle soreness – the kind that makes you wince as you walk downstairs after a day of squats – is quite common after the first day of a new workout. But this is not the case, most likely to happen after the second day, thanks to a phenomenon known as the re-fight effect.
In fact, pain-inducing training seems to give you some protection against additional pain that lasts for quite some time. (It fades over time, but research shows that some protection can last for months.) If you’ve ever followed and trained with a friend, you’ve seen it in action. You may be sick for a week, but since they do the same workout all the time, they hardly feel anything.
It also explains why you have more aches and pains at the beginning of an exercise program than after a few weeks. Sometimes people wonder if the program has stopped working, but you can still get stronger even if you are not sick. , and vice versa.
How to use the replay effect to your advantage
If you are starting a new exercise program or doing a new type of workout for the first time in a while, don’t go all out on your first day. Medium intensity training will still cause the re-fight effect, allowing you to train harder on the second day, once you activate this defense.
If you’ve already had a killer first day and are now in agony, it’s best to return to the gym on schedule. It’s okay if you need an extra day of rest, but don’t feel like you have to wait for the pain to go away . Work on it and the soreness will subside.
What if you’ve been exercising for a while, but it still hurts? Chances are, you haven’t been doing the same movements all the time. If you squat, bench, and deadlift every week, you will be protected from the soreness of your squat, bench press, and deadlift workouts. But if you love variety so much that you do different YouTube videos or different CrossFit classes every day, you are preventing your body from getting used to any particular exercise.
(Getting enough sleep and eating enough can also help manage soreness, so if you’re sick, dieting constantly and never going to bed on time, it’s worth taking a look at these habits as well.)
Like many other fitness challenges , the solution to pain is persistence. I know it’s scary to lie in bed the day after your first workout and think: ugh, should I go back? But if you do, it will get better. Promise.