The best way to recover from the muscle soreness produced by a high-intensity exercise, is to do alternating muscle contractions and relaxations on the rest days rather than doing nothing — or complete abstinence from any exercise or further exertion. That is the main reason for increasing soreness in the subsequent days after a single high-intensity workout — until the recovery process runs its natural course in about a week.
The reason for the pain and soreness is inflammation — also known as swelling, that instigates the healing process. To speed up that process, the alternation of muscle contractions alternated with relaxations produces the flow of those waste products out of the muscle tissues back towards the heart and other purifying and recycling organs of the body. That is the primary function of all the muscles of the body that ensures its health — to produce that flow, or movement within the body. Without that movement, the body naturally dies, deteriorates, and malfunctions — because the optimal conditions for its operation are absent or lacking.
Every living thing is designed produce its own best health — or its life cannot be sustained. Even in medical interventions, the expectation is that the body will heal itself, and recover in the modified way intended. If it can’t recover from that procedure, then there is no point in proceeding further down that particular path.
But what has been noted for thousands of years, is that producing a flow of the body’s vital energy and resources, is what heals and makes the body stronger. The Chinese called it chi, and the Indians called it prana, and then modern medicine called it neuromuscular and cardiovascular — which are different names for the same thing. If they want to break it down further, it can be called acupressure, acupuncture, reflexology, meditation, etc.
The body is not static but a constant movement within — unless it is blocked or disengaged, frequently by one’s own actions and intentions. The obvious case are the top athletes who die prematurely from some heart condition — while thinking they can achieve immortality by pushing their bodies to extreme limits. Such individuals are usually born with strong hearts and prematurely wear them out by thinking it is the only organ in the body responsible for flow (circulation). However, all muscles operating as the heart does — alternatively contracting and relaxing — produces a flow, and when all the muscles of the body are in that synchronicity and synergy, then extraordinary feats are possible — and that body is even one with the universe, rather than struggling against it.
That was the ancient paradigm of life — that each individual was in a struggle against everything and all of life — rather than observing all of life, and finding a way to be in that flow of the greater reality. Surely, that would be the secret to living a long life in prosperity. A few are more gifted than others in every realm and activity so it is important to understand that everyone will not achieve the same results as all the others, but certain principles apply to all.
All living things have to respire — or exchange vital nutrients with their environment to maintain and optimize their health. With inflammation, the question is how to effectively get those accumulated waste products out of the body (tissues) to create the space for new life-giving nutrients to enter. But the equation has to be seen rightly — as first pumping out the old, and Nature takes care of the rest — for everybody.
Contrary to what many believe, you can’t force the heart to pump stagnant fluid out of the tissues. The skeletal muscles of the body are much more numerous — not simply for the purpose of lifting more weight but because operating as the heart does pumping blood back towards the heart, it creates a tremendous vacuum for which the heart has no resistance for its own work — and that is the whole purpose, and not simply to make the work the heart harder until it is the first organ to fail typically and fatally.
That is the lesson to be learned in the question of how to get rid of the pain caused by inflammation (the accumulation of waste products caused by regular metabolism as well as accelerated efforts such as high-intensity exercise). As was noted by Arthur Jones in formulating his Nautilus Principles of exercise, that was the missing link, and what made such manner of exercise unsustainable — but effective while it could be. That exercise had to be brief and infrequent — but even then, there was the inescapable pain and soreness of training that way. But that was negative conditioning — which the body will avoid as much as possible.
However, he didn’t realize he found the solution all along — in first identifying the position in which a muscle had to be fully contracted and what position it had to be fully relaxed. And that was what was important — and not providing resistance in going from one position to the other. The body doesn’t care about that. It is like the modern day computer or any modern appliance that only cares whether it is “On” or “Off” — and not the difficulty in moving from one position to the other.
Initially it might have mattered to prevent the switch from slipping too easily into the wrong position but now it doesn’t matter, and the same switch is used alternately to produce the “On” or “Off” condition. Muscles are that same way: it can be on or off — contracted or relaxed — and that is its power. It’s not the resistance in moving from one state to the other that has magic. Life is discrete and binary in that way — as is all of reality, night and day, up and down, left and right, high and low pressures making the world go round.
Or one can remain mystified by it all — as one more thing unrelated to all the others. Shit just happens — and there’s nothing one can do about it — and that is my excuse for everything.
