How Can Little Muscles Hurt So Much?

— The Inner Dot2Trot —

Monday morning I had my first session with my new trainer. She’d planned to take it easy with me for the first week. She didn’t want me getting so sore I’d stop working out.

After our first session, I felt great. We did a lot of work with kettlebells — squats, presses, lunges, crunches and twists. After the session, I hit the treadmill for 45 minutes. It was awesome. I felt like I had the tiger by the tail. I just didn’t realize that the tiger was biding his time. Bastard!

Roughly 12 hours later, I made the mistake of getting out of my comfy chair. Wow did that hurt. My hamstrings, abductors and glutes screamed at me in unison.

But I knew the pain meant I’d done something right. I’d asked my muscles to do something they hadn’t done in a long time and this was their response. But I know my body will acclimate and the cycle will start again.

Flash forward to today: I did yoga this morning to help stretch my muscles and warm them up before meeting with my trainer. When I finished and my legs didn’t hurt, I thought I’d turned a corner. Ha!

When I got to the gym today, my trainer did not take pity on me. Working with barbells, I did presses, squats, pull-ups, lunges, rows, step ups and mountain climbers. For each exercise I had to do as many as possible for 30 seconds with only 15 seconds of recovery between exercises.

The soreness came back with abandon — in the glutes, especially.

I toyed with just going home, but I decided to hit the treadmill. After the first 3 minutes I was hurting. I picked up my iPod every intention of abandoning my power walk. Thankfully I ignored this impulse and kept walking, even increasing the speed. About 5 minutes later my legs felt great.

I finished my walk 22 minutes later and left the gym very proud that I’d pushed through the pain.