In a bid to build up some stamina for an impending Bike Park Wales trip, I've started doing squats each morning. I do a bit of stretching to warm up first, then 50 squats.
2 days in and my thighs are burning! I'm walking like a Thunderbirds puppet too 😳
Should I have a rest until I'm a little less sore, or MTFU and keep on with it? Will keeping on do any harm even if its painful? I assume its lactic acid build up making me sore, is there anything I can do to reduce this (I always get it bad doing any new exercise).
Rest days are needed to allow the muscles to recover, exercise effectively damages the muscle and it rebuilds itself to be bigger and stronger. Without rest you run the risk of over training the muscle and will reduce the benefit of the exercise.
Give yourself a rest day every couple of days and just stretch your legs out rather than doing the squats. If you're feeling pain reduce the amount you're doing (50 from nothing is quite a lot), pain is the body telling you something isn't quite right, you will feel discomfort when exercising as it is hard work, but pain is bad. The phrase should really be "No mild discomfort, no gain"
Diet won't help a great deal with the soreness, but ensuring you're getting enough proteins, amino acids etc. will give you body the fuel it needs to rebuild and recover efficiently
Won't do any harm, assuming it's just DOMS. Might hurt more initially but research suggests that more exercise reduces pain.
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ueMh1x7kFjsC&pg=PA59&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=false
Page 68.
Mtfu. It'll stop hurting soon enough.
It's not lactic acid, that will have returned to normal after a few hours. What you most likely have is tens of thousands of microscopic tears in the exercised muscles. This is normal when starting to exercise a previously under utilised muscle group. [EDIT] As mentioned above the name given to the pain caused by these microscopic tears is DOMS [/EDIT]
Wait for the discomfort to go, then do your next session, you'll find that the duration of the soreness between session will get shorter until the point that you can comfortably do it every day without any undue soreness.
Cheers Flaperon
I'm going to test Saxon & Donnellys findings with some light concentric exercise tonight which should at least temporary alleviate the DOMS, and then look forward to the Repeated-Bout effect 😀