Muscle Pain After Soccer Matches Or Training!

Getting Rid of Pain… Causes and Prevention

Everyone has experienced it –you get home after training, your leg muscles are hurting slightly, but you just go to bed thinking that you’ve put in a good training. However, the next day comes the ugly realisation: you’ve woken up with fierce muscle pain.

What Causes the Pain?

It was long suspected that acidification of the muscles was the cause of muscle ache. This has however been disproved. Rather, the reason is that overloading the muscles causes small tears to develop in the muscle tissue. If these tears get inflamed due to the penetration of water, the muscles swell up. Because this process does not occur straight away, our muscles only start to ache 12 to 24 hours after exercising. Especially after weight training and abrupt braking exercises, where extreme sudden demands are placed on the muscles, muscle tears will tend to develop quicker.

Muscle ache occurs only when training has overloaded the athlete. Therefore the training was not really good, because it caused an injury. Earlier, many believed that muscle ache was a sign of hard, but good training.

What helps?

Massage?

No, not really!You can imagine that massaging muscles, which contain tears, does not really make sense. You will tend to worsen matters.

Stretching?

I have to admit that, for a long time, I believed that stretching helped me. But far from it,even stretching usually makes things worse. It is actually logical; you don’t want to exert damaged muscles any more.

Cooling Down?

There is a reason why many teams employ "cooling down sessions". Using an apparently light workout, you achieve the same effect, even by cycling, for example, or easy soccer training sessions. Get your team to run 3-4 laps slowly and in a relaxed manner, 20-30 minutes after exertion. It is important to stimulate muscle recovery. The quicker relaxation sets in, the less worried you need be about getting muscle ache.

In Summary

There are many myths connected with muscle ache. Everyone has tips and tricks up his sleeve, which are supposed to help.In soccer training, players will have varying levels of fitness; therefore the overload limit will be different for each player. Pay attention to this and remember: always have a cool down session after there has been any major exertion.

There is no miracle cure, apart from giving up sport, that is.

Muscle ache will always exist! However, it can be avoided with well-paced training.