If you are a regular listener of the Get-Fit Guy podcast, you will know that I love a good anecdote. So, I’ll kick this off with a little story from my life this week. As you know, I do a whole bunch of different training, including karate, judo, boxing, and gymnastics. Now, this past week, the weather here was really cold, and the gymnastic facility I go to had no heating. During my tumbling training, I felt fine, but later that evening, I had really painful knees. Bilaterally, under both kneecaps. I have actually had surgery here before, on the patellar tendons. So, it’s likely that I had a bit of tendon inflammation, probably from the cold making things a bit stiffer. The next day, I went to judo training and said to one of the coaches that my knees were sore. One of the other, older coaches then chimed in with “I can’t remember the last time my knees didn’t hurt” as he pulled on two knee braces to get ready to train.
Now, what this tells me is that, to some extent, this coach has normalized pain and injury, which is something that I see very often. In 2018, I was working with a gym in Iceland on coach development for their staff and during a meeting, the owner of the gym claimed that his gym had the lowest injury rate in Iceland. This is a claim he couldn’t actually make, because first, his gym had no reporting procedure or record keeping of client injury and second, they didn’t have access to the records (or lack of) from other facilities. I took him down to the gym floor to look at a class where several participants were wearing ONE knee sleeve. You only wear one knee sleeve or one wrist wrap if you have one sore knee or one sore wrist. Walking wounded are injured clients!
In my view, as soon as we begin to normalize injury and pain in participants, we are heading into a strange place, because that’s not what fitness is about. In my very first episode here, I defined fitness as the absence of disease or injury in an organism. If our actions as coaches or as singular exercise participants result in injury or pain, then we have failed in the goal of being in a state of fitness.
But that old adage “no pain, no gain” is still prevalent in the fitness industry and in how people perceive their training. But where does the expression come from and what does it really mean? We can find similar expressions going back all the way to the 5th century BC, where the Greek poet Sophocles wrote, “nothing truly succeeds without pain,” and even Benjamin Franklin expressed something similar in 1758’s The Way to Wealth, saying, “there are no gains without pains.” But the phrase itself entered popular vernacular with Jane Fonda, who used it repeatedly in her popular 1980s exercise videos.
But what was Jane Fonda getting at? She was referring to what is known as DOMS, an acronym standing for Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness. This muscle soreness after workouts typically occurs 24-72 hours after training. It’s not entirely clear what causes it, though there are a couple of theories. The first is that it’s microtrauma to the muscle fibers and the second is that calcium accumulates in the muscle, inhibiting some cellular processes and causing a build-up of inflammatories such as histamines. Regardless of the exact cause, what you need to know is that DOMS has not been shown to reflect a severity of damage or a decrease in function.
It also generates what is called “repeated bout effect,” where soreness is reduced next time and also the duration of the effect is reduced. Of course, like all things we do, this has some degree of specificity, meaning that an adaptation to DOMS in the legs doesn’t mean you won’t have upper body DOMS if you decide to train a hard upper push-pull day.
Real Fitness is about more than those legs looking good. Check out what I had to say about the functional fitness of having strong legs. Or listen to this podcast episode in the player here:
Irrespective of the fact that DOMS itself is not injurious, it’s definitely not on my list of fun things to get out of my time at the gym. So we should try to make sure that we are applying any new exercise carefully. We should look to manage the loading and the volume. We can’t go straight to the maximal dosage of exercise, which is one reason I am such a big fan of individual program design rather than group classes. Of course, classes have a lot going for them such as a positive and supportive environment, socialization, and so on, but since the program isn’t written with an individual in mind, it can be easy to overdose on the exercise prescription. Caution when first starting any new exercise regime, even if you play other sports or do other forms of exercise, is always admirable.
But what if we do find ourselves the victim of the dreaded DOMS? Well, we can wait it out or we can look to anything which will increase localized blood flow. So, in the event of DOMS in the legs, you could look to walking or very low resistance, low effort cycling. Maybe even a sauna or hot tub. (I’ve talked a bit about the benefits of heat.) Gentle massage or palpation of the muscle (a really hard massage or hard foam roll might cause further muscle damage—if the muscle damage hypothesis is correct). In the only two studies done on the effect of cold (cryotherapy or ice plunge) on DOMS, one found it to be effective and the other found it to be ineffective. All studies done on ibuprofen and DOMS found it to be ineffectual.
The biggest thing for me when we come to look at pain in training is that, just like I don’t find I can trust most (although not all) clients with things like RPE in training, I don’t find we are great at recognizing or admitting to ourselves that we have DOMS and not an injury. In my example earlier about the gym in Iceland, if you are wearing a single knee sleeve to train for weeks on end because your knee is sore, you have a chronic injury (irrespective of the severity) and not DOMS, so in this case, “no pain no gain” as a maxim is ill-advised! We have to be able to objectively evaluate our pain experience and see what we can do to continue to train without worsening our physical situation because injury is NOT a state of physical fitness.
Disclaimer
All content here is for informational purposes only. This content does not replace the professional judgment of your own health provider. Please consult a licensed health professional for all individual questions and issues.