First, it’s important to understand why muscles get sore in the first place.
When muscles are required to work harder than they usually do, either through exercise, poor posture, or even sitting in one place for too long, they suffer microscopic damage to the muscle fibers.
While muscle tissue soreness often disappears within a few days, sometimes it lingers longer. That’s usually because your fascia is reacting, by constricting. Fascia is the thin casing and spider web-like webbing of connective tissue that holds every part of your body in place, including the musculoskeletal system. Fascia’s role is to “protect”, but sometimes protecting means strangling of the muscles, limiting lymphatic flow.
Healthy fascia is smooth and flexible, but a lifestyle of limited physical activity, trauma, or overworking parts of your body can make it stiff and resistant to movement. The result? Soreness that doesn’t seem to go away.
Many people find temporary relief by improving their flexibility or manually working on the sore spot with a foam roller. Other options to treat onset muscle soreness may offer more lasting relief, such as percussion massagers—designed to give you a deep tissue massage and relieve the stiffness—or a manual myofascial device designed to help regenerate damaged tissue.
