If there's one thing anyone in the gym hates, it's train with laces. The stiffness is terribly painful and prevents you from exercising the necessary force to carry out the exercises in your routine. The stiffness comes out as a result of the muscle damage produced during training sessions. With these pains, people wonder if training with stiffness will be healthy for our body or not. Others choose to reduce the volume of training or the loads they use in the exercises so as not to feel that pain.
Do you want to know if it is good to train with laces? Here we explain everything to you.
Why do the shoelaces come out?
The stiffness is the result of muscle damage during training sessions. When we subject the muscle to an intense stimulus, we release lactic acid in our muscles as a waste product after the metabolization of muscle glycogen. This causes the accumulation of this acid to cause pain after the following days. Normally, the maximum pain occurs when about 48 hours elapse after physical exercise.
It does not have to be too strenuous exercise that causes soreness. Simply, for those people who are not used to exercising and, suddenly, we start an exercise routine, they will be subjected to the pain of stiffness. There are some ways to remove the shoelaces but it is always better not to have them.
For those people who are used to doing physical exercise, if they undergo a stronger and more intense training than usual, they will cause more muscle damage. The breakage of these fibers will also cause us to have more pain when moving and exerting force. However, not because we have stiffness should we stop training or do it with less load or intensity.
When we train at a certain intensity and with a training volume adapted to our abilities, we don't have to have stiffness. It is normal that, at first, we have more fatigue and pain when having to overcome that resistance that is the loads or the weight that we put on the machines and dumbbells. On the other hand, if every time we have stiffness we reduce our training volume or its intensity, we will not be allowing to create neuromuscular adaptations in our organism.
Importance of being progressive
A training stalls if we always do the same. It is necessary to vary the weight, the repetitions, the mechanical tension that we exert during the exercise, modify the rest times, etc. For the training to give results. Otherwise, we will not be growing or advancing in our goal. Keep in mind that having stiffness does not have to be bad or good.
When we increase our level of loads that we introduce in the machines and that we lift, it is normal for the muscle damage to rise. However, we should never work on muscle failure. Muscle failure is the repetition that we could not do another repetition without help. If in all series or in all exercises we reach muscle failure, we will increase the stress that the muscle is undergoing during the sessions and it will be exhausted sooner. Not only will it cause more fibers to break and their damage greater, but recovery will be slower, the risk of injury increases and soreness appears.
If you have been training in an exercise routine for a long time, you will be adapted to it. The more load you lift, the more effort it takes. However, if we do that increase in load progressively, it does not have to increase muscle damage.
So that you understand it better, we are going to give an example. Imagine that we have been doing a bench press for 3 weeks in which we put a total of 60 kg of loads. If in the fourth week we put in 75 kg, we will be increasing the load a lot at once. If we want to perform the same number of repetitions and series with that weight, we will cause excessive muscle damage and, therefore, stiffness will appear. The ideal is to increase that weight little by little to create adaptations.
Is it good to train with laces?
When we have been doing the same routine for some time (more or less 3 or 4 months), we notice that our body is completely adapted and does not progress enough. It is in this case when we change our routine to modify the stimuli that our muscles receive. Probably, The first days that we carry out the new routine will be in which we have stiffness.
However, training with laces should not be a problem. With a good warm-up and proper stretching, we will reduce the pain of the sores. If we stop training or decrease the volume of training and its intensity so that it does not hurt so much, we will be making the body not adapt to that training. In such a way that, if we repeat that training again, we will have stiffness again.
We usually recover from shoelaces in as little as 3-5 days. The sores that are very painful and that do not allow us to train, take longer to go away. In the case in which you have this type of stiffness, think that you do not have to repeat a training like this at all. As the experience in the gym progresses, we get used to adapting the training volume to our own performance. When we find the exact volume, we will have no soreness and only a few discomforts or mini sores on the days that we apply progressive overload.
What does not train with laces depend on?
There are times when it is better not to train with laces. These cases hang around those really painful sores that do not allow us to perform any type of basic movement. At this point, the body is asking us for absolute rest to recover little by little.
In all other cases, as long as we can train, it is better to do it at the same pace as always. There are some ways to help heal stiffness and that is by having a good warm-up prior to the strength routine, proper stretching of the joints and muscles, and the use of anti-inflammatories to reduce pain.
I hope that with this information you will solve your doubts about whether to train with laces or not.