How to Make Sore Muscles Feel Good

Muscles can often feel sore after exercise or different kinds of activities. Although muscle pain can be unbearable and keep you from exercising, the good news is that the more you exercise, the less your muscles will hurt in the long term. So, here are some tips to alleviate common muscle soreness:

1) Rest: Resting is the best thing you can do for soreness. Try not to use the muscle for 24-48 hours after exercise.

 2) Massage your muscles: When you exercise, tiny tears occur in muscle fibers. The body's natural response to these tears is inflammation. Massage helps you to relieve the inflammation. Massage also seems to increase the amount of mitochondria in your muscle, which causes the muscles' ability to extract oxygen. Don’t forget, massage therapy is relaxing, meditative, and healing. You can use your thumbs, knuckles and palms while massaging your aching muscles.

3) Stretch the muscles out: Stretching will also help to get the lactic acid out of your muscles. Stretch after activity that caused the soreness to prevent becoming stiff.

4) Ice the muscle indirectly: Icing the muscle immediately after activity would reduce inflammation and provide more lasting relief. When icing a muscle, to wrap an ice pack on the sore muscle area would work the best.

5) Apply heat: After the first day of soreness, heat can be used to help blood flow to the muscle. This will help rebuilding take place and provide some relief for your muscles.


6) Take pain medication (for adults, not children): Anti-inflammatory drugs such as Ibuprofen (Advil) or naproxen (Aleve) would work out well. For children, just because their muscles just start developing, in my opinion, medication intake may be harmful.

                                       ENJOY WORKING OUT AND TAKE CARE!

                                                                   GULSEN XX