Back to Categories
Comments? email me!
| Introduction | DOMS is a phenomenon almost everyone is familiar with.
Everyone has experienced the stiffness and soreness the day after heavy
exertion. Its cause(s) are one of the raging controversies in exercise
physiology, about which much has been written, even in muscle and fitness
magazines. DOMS is your body's way of telling you exactly how hard you can work it. Use it as your guide. The older you are, the quicker the onset of DOMS, and the easier it will appear. This is an indication of the need for regular muscle training. |
|
| What it is NOT | DOMS is NOT the ache you feel after doing many repetitions of an exercise. That is the so-called lactic-acid burn. The popular explanation for DOMS is the muscle-tearing/repairing/rebuilding scenario. However, the proponents of this theory confuse a number of issues. First, they reason that because fractured bone is stronger at the break point after it mends, that muscle must do the same. This is absolutely not true. Muscle, tendon, and ligament tears are generally weaker after repair, and take half of forever to get repaired, not the few days of discomfort of DOMS. And, if the fibres are torn, the tear should be immediate, and the pain immediate, not delayed. Second, some of the most serious cases of DOMS seem to occur in the untrained, when loading of the muscle required to produce DOMS is fairly minimal. In fact, in the severely sedentary, mere stretching can create serious DOMS! This DOMS also occurs when the recruitment of motor neurons is lowest. DOMS does not occur readily in trained individuals, even with maximal exertions, before significant muscle hypertrophy has had a chance to take place, because motor neurons are maximally recruited. |
|
What DOMS (probably) IS! |
So, taking this all into account, it would appear that
DOMS would seem to be the result of a relative disparity between high effort and
poor motor neuron recruitment. Note that this effort may be rather low in
absolute terms. So what then, is the source of pain in DOMS? Recall that it is quite similar to the pain of a large black and blue. And note that the pain of a black and blue is not from the color, which is a simple hematoma (which in themselves are not painful) but from the impact of a sharp blow on a muscle, usually next to a bone. The black and blue is a simple coincidence of bruised blood vessels with damaged muscle fibre. And the question still remains, what is this damage? A blow to a muscle probably separates the facia of adjacent fibres, which are probably in some neural contact with each other. A sharp blow "splays" these fibres so that they are separated and strained to some degree. The resulting pain is from the standard chemistry of pain receptors, which respond to chemicals released from "inappropriate" biochemical actions, such as cellular release of histamines, etc.. What has this to do with poor recruitment of motor neurons? What is likely to be happening is that non-homogeneous activation of muscle fibres is simply causing a separation of one "recruited" fibre from another, which is not being coordinatedly activated. Thus, DOMS results from a splaying of muscle fibres relative to each other, not a tearing of individual muscle fibres. As the fibres restore themselves adjacent to each other, reconnection occurs, as well as the stimulation of adjacent motor neurons. The added strength that is observed after DOMS is probably the stimulation of added motor neurons. |
Alternate explanation Unconditioned or deconditioned people (which can include athletes after several weeks of inactivity) apparently (nothing is etched in stone in this field yet!) lose a certain amount of neurological control of the motor unit of the muscle. In other words, coordinated firing at the muscle fibre is reduced! Before exercise causes hypertrophy of the muscle (the muscle getting bigger), "motor neuron recruitment" increases, i.e., more nerve activity. Even under very mild stress, muscle damage occurs, separating the fibres and damaging the cell membrane of the muscle fibre (NOT TEARING THE MUSCLE, as you read so often). This is not from a heavy weight; this is from the neurologic condition of the muscle itself. The strength increase after a bout of DOMS is NOT, in my opinion, due to the "muscle tearing, and then rebuilding.;" this is borderline ridiculous, given how long it takes to repair an athletic injury involving a torn muscle--which does not then get stronger! We are not talking broken bones here, and the subsequent stronger re-calcified joint. |
HOW TO USE DOMS TO YOUR ADVANTAGE |
Keep in mind that it is difficult to exercise with serious DOMS. Thus it makes sense to exercise just up to the point of DOMS, i.e., very slight sensation of DOMS. This means exercising gradually in increasing intensity over a few days, which also depends at what state the individual is in. | |
What are other implications of DOMS? |
It is unlikely that DOMS is related to strength gain from anything other than a neural coordination, at least initially. This brings up the question of how strength is really gained. Another discussion. . | |
| Longer term gains | Longer term gains basically mean hypertrophy. Exercising to the point of DOMS (if that is even possible after a certain amount of training) no doubt coincides with eventual muscle development or hypertrophy. However, significant strength gain, and in many cases predominant strength gain, occurs without muscle hypertrophy, and instead motor neuron recruitment. | |
| What is "strong enough"? | The point at which, no matter how much you exert yourself, you no longer get DOMS. This is a very significant milestone in strength adaptation, and for those whose goals are not athletic per se, can be the final benchmark. | |
| MMMMMMMMMMMMMM | MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM | MMMMMMMMMMMMMM |