If you’re reading this, it’s likely that you had a workout in the last 48 hours and are now extremely sore.

It can be quite worrying especially if you’ve never experienced this before, but don’t panic, you haven’t injured yourself.

The soreness and pain you are experiencing right now are quite normal and to be expected if you’re new to exercise or haven’t done so in a while.

So what is this pain?

It’s called DOMS – The delayed onset of muscle soreness.

DOMS is a normal response when you first start exercising again or do something physically new and challenging to your body.

While it may be concerning if you’ve never experienced this before, like we said this is perfectly normal and to be expected, usually the pain is worse 24-48 hours after a workout but the pain usually goes down after that.

Another thing you don’t have to worry about is having this happen after every session, what your body will quite cleverly do is adapt to the training stimulus.

So it will repair and strengthen your muscles to prevent your body from feeling as sore from the same level of exercise and as you continue to slowly increase the intensity of workouts your body will continually adapt to prevent yourself from experiencing severe muscle soreness.

But only if you are regularly exercising each week, long breaks between sessions (weeks not days) will mean you’ll experience this sort of pain after every session.

You may find yourself feeling sore again when you change your training routine or increase the intensity of your workout but never quite to the level you are experiencing now.

So what can you do right now to help with the soreness?

Well, as strange as it sounds, staying active, and keeping your muscles warm and your body mobile will speed up recovery, staying still will make it worse.

Avoid deep stretching (it will only make DOMS worse) but light mobility work will do wonders for you.

Two other things that will help are recovery in the form of sleep and fuel in the form of protein, getting enough of these two things will help speed up recovery from the soreness.

We hope that helps and puts your mind at rest knowing that you haven’t done anything harmful during training.