Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery

by Christie Aschwanden

I couldn’t say whether I really had adhesions in my fascia

Key point. No diagnosis. Perhaps everyone gets them?

“I can take a video and put it out on Instagram and someone in Florida or Minnesota can find it and think, how can I get that? When they see the pros on social media, they see a trusted brand. It spreads like wildfire.”

The pain of DOMS typically peaks 24 to 72 hours after the exercise (hence the name), and it’s more likely to occur after exercise that emphasizes eccentric contraction where the muscle is lengthening, rather than shortening (think the phase in an arm curl where you’re lowering a barbell, versus raising it).

The color of your pee is essentially just a measure of how concentrated your urine is. If it’s got more waste than water, it looks dark, and if it’s mostly water, it’s light or almost clear.

The latest research shows that protein will help recovery whether you consume it before or even during exercise. There’s nothing magic about the 20, 30, or 60 minutes after a workout. The benefits come from the protein itself, according to Schoenfeld, not the exact timing of its consumption.11

But a massage that’s too vigorous or deep can cause a condition called “postmassage soreness and malaise” (PMSM), which produces a set of flu-like symptoms.

Some massage therapists explain this away as a sign that the massage has flushed “toxins” from the muscles, but this idea is totally bogus, Ingraham says. There’s absolutely no evidence that there are toxins in the muscle that need to come out.

If you want to promote blood flow through tired muscles and help them clear by-products of intense exercise, such as lactate, a simple, effective way to do this is with easy exercise like the gentle spinning on their trainers that Tour de France riders sometimes do after their races.11

The current thinking holds that overtraining syndrome is what happens when the stress of training no longer provokes adaptations, and instead throws an athlete spiraling into a prolonged state of fatigue.