Devlin Brown at the water cooler: What you do between workouts is important

Q: Why do I feel stiff between sessions? Am I overdoing it or is it because I do nothing but sit between sessions? Should I not just put a beer fridge on the other side of the house and keep moving that way?

As I settle down to pen this response, I am acutely aware of intense stiffness in my glutes, adductor and abductors and quadriceps. Either it is a sign of not skipping leg day or it’s because I sit too hard. It’s probably both.

You’ll encounter a few gym-bro clichés in this column, but that’s because delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) is as closely related to exercise as the EFF is to the national discourse. You may feel you can work through it, but there’s always a risk it will shut you down. Gym-goers have tried to find revolutionary slogans to justify their pain ever since the first meathead crab-walked into his sales meeting imagining he were Conan the Barbarian.

“Motion is lotion.” Sitting, though it pays the bills for people like you and I, is about the worst thing we can do to ourselves physically. When you become stiff from exercise, you must keep moving the joint above and below the sore muscle. As uncomfortable as it is, you must move. Gently — your goal is not entry to Valhalla, it’s being able to descend and rise from the toilet seat with dignity.

“Pain is weakness leaving the body”. That’s just stupid. The soreness you feel is the result of micro-tears and trauma, followed by inflammation, caused by exercise. Note, we use the word soreness, because pain can refer to something far more serious — you must learn to differentiate between DOMS and an acute injury. A stiff shoulder is not the same as a rotator cuff injury.

“No pain, no gain.” That’s the first cousin of the last cliché, and equally misleading. Many people associate DOMS with a successful workout. That’s not always true. You see, any new exercise or movement can cause DOMS, especially if it is performed at high intensity with a focus on the eccentric phase of the movement. Once your body adapts to the new programme, DOMS will become less intense. You may not get stiff at all, yet you still progress.

However, if you are not progressing each and every workout, meaning you are not incrementally increasing the reps, weight, intensity or duration, yet you still become stiff every time, it likely means you are not recovering sufficiently between workouts, and you are doing things that limit your body’s ability to react and adapt to physical exercise.

All of this is said on the presumption that there are no other underlying health issues — get clearance to move from a professional if you are older than you were last year. If that sounds ridiculous, consider that I felt invincible and was pushing personal records on everything in the weeks leading up to a hypertension scare that was the result of disrespecting stress and downplaying a glaring family history.

Warming up and cooling down, drinking enough water, sufficient sleep, a good diet and enough movement are crucial to recover from exercise. What about bad habits? Wine or beer in moderation is said to be fine, and at least according to some studies, caffeine in moderation has some positive effects, including the combating of DOMS.

However, alcohol consumption absolutely interferes with recovery, and coupled with excess coffee intake — and smoking, which tends to increase with coffee and alcohol — the body is first trying to recover from the vice assault before getting a chance to think about going through its metabolic motions to recover from a HIIT session.

It’s not easy to treat a bad case of DOMS. Massage, movement and foam rolling, while painful, work. Topical analgesics are said to work though they’ve never really helped me. Ice cold baths have been part of recovery regimens for decades, while warm water soothes the soreness.

I find that the best treatment is an easy recovery workout, even a walk or swim, because even gym bros know the truth: motion is lotion.