Fitness and Sore Muscle Management at Easton Training Center

Sore muscles don’t have to keep you from exercising. These tricks help you overcome soreness for a speedy return to the gym.

The muscle soreness from a fitness session, which could include; CrossFit, boot camp, BJJ or kickboxing (basically: everything we do at Easton Training Center) is too often used as an excuse to skip the next day’s training. Luckily, there’s a way around the pain. Scot Prohaska, a performance enhancement specialist and S&C coach to UFC luminaries such as Michael Bisping and Alan Belcher, among others, has three simple tricks to beat the soreness to get back to the gym.

“The number one way to take away muscle soreness is to take an Epsom salt bath,” says Prohaska. It’s a highly effective way to put magnesium back into your muscles after an intense (or the first in a while) workout. Prohaska suggests taking the hottest bath you can tolerate, for 30 minutes. If you want to go the extra mile, do as Prohaska’s athletes do: open up your pores by applying rubbing alcohol to your legs before entering the bath.
Epsom salt baths, however, are extremely dehydrating. Make sure you drink plenty of water during and after the bath. Hydration, in general, is a way to help manage your body’s reaction to hard training. Drinking water and electrolyte-enhanced beverages will aid any other treatment of sore muscles you use.
Now, there’s a difference between soreness and injury. If you’re injured, what you need is rest. But soreness can usually be worked through, and it should be. Prohaska says the second step to overcoming sore muscles is high-intensity continuous training. That is, five to 25-minute exercises the day after the workout that left you sore. Utilize high-resistance bikes and pedal with a push/pause stroke, quickly pausing at the top of each rotation. It helps recover the mitochondria that have been damaged in your muscles.
Wrap it all up with a Branched Chain Amino Acid (BCAA) beverage. BCAAs make up 35 percent of muscle mass and must be present for repairing damaged muscle tissue. Plus, there’s the added benefit that they form antibodies and help carry oxygen throughout the body.
Following these tips, says Prohaska, and it’ll be a rare day when you have to skip out on an important day of training because of sore muscles. If it works for UFC veterans, it should work great for the rest of us.
Written by: Brian Schulz