How to Manage Muscle Soreness As You Get Older

Understanding Muscle Soreness in Older Adults

In this episode, Dr. Jeffrey Guild, physical therapist and specialist in vestibular and geriatric care, dives into the important topic of delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) in the older population.

If you’re an older adult starting strength training, or if you’ve experienced muscle soreness and want to know what’s normal, what’s not, and how to build strength safely — this episode is for you!

We break down:
✅ What delayed onset muscle soreness really is (and what it isn’t)
✅ Why a certain level of soreness is normal and even essential for building strength
✅ The critical difference between appropriate soreness and dangerous overtraining
✅ How eccentric (lowering) movements in strength training promote muscle gains
✅ Special considerations for strength training over the age of 60, 70, 80, and even 90+

Learn how to optimize your strength training while staying safe, mobile, and independent as you age.

🧠 Movement is life — and strength is a foundation for healthy aging. Tune in now to learn more!

On this episode of the Optimove podcast, we're going to talk about delayed onset muscle soreness in the older population. And if you are getting into strength training, if you are older and you've experienced this before, you want to learn more about it and how this applies to you, what's good, what's not good when your muscles are sore after strength training, this episode is for you. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Dr. Jeffrey Guild, physical therapist, and we get this information out to you to help older people move better. So muscle soreness is a big topic in the strength training circles and especially with the older population. And we run into this quite a bit. Because there can be some challenges with muscle soreness after strength training. I'm going to spend just a little bit of time on this. I'm gonna get right to the meat and potatoes of this topic to give you powerful information that you can really sink your teeth into and just get started and get going. when it comes to strength training and the muscle soreness that happens as a result. So delayed onset muscle soreness. Is the muscle soreness that happens. twelve to seventy-two hours after strength training. And this is normal. It is appropriate. And it is even an essential component to strength training. If we're going to optimize our strength training in, in any way, then we need a certain level of delayed onset muscle soreness. Now, some of the confusion is some people think that muscle soreness that happens is lactic acid. What I'm talking about here is not lactic acid. Lactic acid is basically the drop in, the increased acidity in our muscles after, during and after exercise. And this gets flushed away. The lactic acid gets flushed away within a couple hours by the body. That's not what we're talking about here. What we're talking about here, the delayed onset muscle soreness is actually the body's immune response. To the muscle damage that has occurred. And muscle damage and muscle breakdown is a good and essential component to strength training. And this is why our muscles are sore. The delay happens usually about a half a day to a day or even two days later after the strength training occurs or whatever stimulus that was that caused the muscle breakdown. The reason for the delay is because it is the body's immune response to the muscle breakdown. It's a way of the body clearing everything out and allowing the repair then to happen. And the reason this is so important is because of the importance of the muscle being able to be broke down Before building it back up and that's an important part of the building muscle process. If you are older, including if you are elderly, if you are over ninety even, this can be an important part. Component to strength training and there is nothing wrong with the light onset muscle soreness even in the older populations. Now, before you shut this episode off, I'm gonna add in a caveat to this. How much muscle soreness you should have when you are older or if you are working with the older population can be very different than the younger population. Just because something is physiologically appropriate doesn't mean that it is actually appropriate. And I'll give you a quick example. If an older person's strength trains And that strength training then really limits their ability to walk, increases risk of falls, causes their legs to get kind of cut out from underneath them, kind of give out. Things like this and really limits their ability to move. That is not appropriate. And that's the difference. Whereas in the younger population, athletic population, or if you're working on bodybuilding or really trying to sculpt your body and really add a lot of strength and muscle and size. And that's an important part of your training. If you're a younger person, then if you're not able to walk as well after lifting legs, well, that's actually it. A good and important part of the strength training of the muscle building development. But that might not be, in fact, it's usually not appropriate in an older population because if that's Strength training then limits their ability to walk and move around. That is less okay and can lead to falls and injuries and decline. That's the difference. if you take one thing from this, either as someone who works with the elderly or if you are an older person yourself and wanting to know how much of this muscle soreness is appropriate, That's where the line is. If the muscle soreness really limits your ability to function, to move around, or causes you to fall, It really limits you from being able to get up from a chair and moving around. That's when it's too much. That's different compared to, well, my legs are a little bit more sore today. Or it's a little bit more difficult to stand up from a chair. I feel stiffness as I'm walking around, but it doesn't limit me. That's when it is appropriate, even in the, even for elderly individuals. And I'm using the term elderly to emphasize how much older People can be and still get the benefit of strength training and including strength training where we get muscle soreness along with the strength training. This is an important part of strength training and muscular development and building muscle is a very essential component to overall health. Especially the older that we get. In fact, the older that we get, the more important it is to build on muscle. And The delayed onset muscle soreness is an important part of building muscle and building strength. So, then you might be wondering how do we create this delayed onset muscle soreness? The most direct answer is it's actually the lowering contraction of a muscle during strength training that causes the muscle soreness more than the shortening contraction. So I'll give you an example. If you do a bicep curl, you lift a dumbbell up and your elbow lift a dumbbell up, you're strengthening your bicep theoretically. When you lower that dumbbell down, that's called the lowering contraction or as we call it the eccentric contraction. Why this is important to understand is this is the part where we get more muscle breakdown. It's because of the way that the muscle fibers contract at the micro level. And the result is more muscle breakdown, which then means there's more improvement or more muscle gains that are to be had. We actually can put on more muscle by emphasizing that eccentric contraction, that lengthening contraction. so to optimize this, we don't just lower the dumbbell down. We lower the dumbbell down slow and controlled. That's how we emphasize that lengthening contraction and that's how we increase muscle soreness, increase muscle mass, and increase muscle strength. Now, can we get benefit from just lifting the dumbbell up quickly and then, and then lowering it down fast without control? Yes, but we don't get as much gain from that. So we're missing out on a very important component of the strength training process if we do not emphasize lowering the weight down slow and controlled. By the way, when you lift the dumbbell, Up, it's called the concentric contraction, or you can think of it as the shortening contraction. That's what we tend to think of when we're, lifting. So we get more muscle soreness during the lowering contraction of the strength training. If you were to look at standing up from a chair, let's say you're doing sit to stands or you're doing chair squats or something. Then it's the lowering yourself down, slow and controlled, theoretically that causes more delayed onset muscle soreness. The lowering yourself down slowly is what will make you more sore. Now, from a practical perspective, yes, one of the benefits here is increased strength and increased muscle mass if you're working on lowering slowly and controlled. But the additional benefit here is you might have noticed that either yourself or your friends or your peers, the people around you, They may not lower themselves down slow and controlled and they may not even be able to physically do so anymore because they've lost their That eccentric contraction, that eccentric strength when they sit down in the chair and all they can do is plop into the chair. You may have noticed this yourself as well. You can only plop into a chair. Even when you try to lower yourself down in a controlled manner, you can't physically do it anymore. The good news is this can be trained again. And we know this because we work with this every single day. We regularly work with people from the age of eighty to ninety-seven years old. Every single day we work with this population and these are the types of things we work on with our clients who are this age. And they are able to build up the strength in their legs and build back that lengthening contraction so they can sit down Slowly and controlled in the chair again. It's not just good enough to be able to stand up from a chair, but can you sit down slow and controlled? Not to mention, of course, the additional benefit of just standing up fast, which is leg power. That's a whole nother topic. But the best way to work on sit to stands or chair squats, whatever it might be, is to stand up fast and then lower yourself down slow and controlled. That's the way you can optimize your strength training if you're working on something such as a sit to stand from a chair. And this has real life implications because if you If you cannot slowly and controlled lower yourself into a chair, then you can have significant challenges coming up ahead if you have lost the physical ability to do that. Not to mention missing out on the gains that we get from that, such as the increase in muscle strength, the increase in muscle mass. And again, we want to increase muscle mass. And the older we get, the more muscle we want. It has so many benefits. That we are missing out on if we are not doing that. And the muscle loss itself causes so many health problems. And we can dive into that in other episodes, but I want to emphasize the main point. Delayed onset muscle soreness is an essential component to strength training, including in the very elderly populations. The only difference is how much delayed onset muscle soreness is appropriate in those populations. And the answer is if the muscle soreness limits your function to where you cannot walk, you have problems standing up from a chair, you have problems getting around or it cause causes falls, then it is inappropriate. Now, this doesn't mean that the person working with you, say you're working with a rehab professional or a personal trainer, if this happens one time, this doesn't mean that the person doesn't know what they're doing because this can happen to anybody. And the body can be a very finicky thing. So don't think that just because you got sore one time where you couldn't function, the person didn't know what they're doing. Or it doesn't mean that you made a mistake and, well, maybe this strength training thing is just a huge problem and this is, you know, there's too many risks to this. That's not the case. All you need to do is if you're working with a professional, let them know so that they can then back off on the strength training that they're doing. If they're good professional people who are highly skilled at what they'll, at what they do, they will know how to back off on the strength training so that you have a more appropriate amount of muscle soreness. And if you're strength training yourself, then same thing. All you have to do is just back off on the intensity and then find that amount of muscle soreness that is more appropriate for you. Now, the other reality to this is delayed onset muscle soreness tends to happen less and less and less and with less intensity the more that we strength train it. So basically your body will get used to the strength training that you're doing and you will tend to get less sore anyway. you might be wondering, okay, what do I do in the meantime while I'm really sore? The best thing you can do or the best way to get rid of delayed onset muscle soreness is actually to do the same activity that you did To give yourself the muscle soreness in the first place, but with a lot less intensity. So if you did a bunch of sit to stands and slowly lowered yourself down and you got yourself very sore that way, A way the next day or the day after you can focus on just standing up and down from the chair a few times and then don't lower yourself down quite as much but focus on the things that you did you can. Maybe do some step ups, do something of lighter intensity or just simply going for a walk. Movement itself will help reduce The muscle soreness, just keep it less intense. Light physical activity will help reduce that muscle soreness. And that's what you can do in the meantime. And all the while, as you're working on improving your body's abilities, basically your body will get used to the muscle soreness as you go. And even as you increase the intensity, you may not experience as much muscle soreness. Or it can be a little bit of time before your body really adjusts to it. It's actually all very individualized. it can depend on the type of muscle that you're strength training. It can depend on What your body is used to. There's a lot of different variables that go along with this, but very important to understand. Hopefully this information was helpful to you or someone that you care about. If it was, subscribe to our channel, send this to someone that you care about, and we'll work on getting more information out to you. Thank you so much. Have a wonderful day. We'll see you on the next one.