I play a lot of sport, every Mon-Wed yet don’t warm up which leads to me straining my muscles all the time. Every week, I get new strains in the same places which take a week to heal and by Monday I strain the muscles again. When I strain my muscles like this all the time, is it impeding me from building muscle? Is it damaging my muscles?
Thanks for your input.
Let me preface this by saying it isn’t medical input. To a very real extent, it’s subtle straining of the muscles that prompts the body to build new muscle tissue as it repairs the old. At least a minimal amount of strain should not be permanently harmful, but I’m not qualified to say how much is too much.
However, be very, very certain that what you are experiencing isn’t in the tendons or ligaments, or that the muscle isn’t partially torn.
Another interesting thing to consider is the difference between warming up and stretching out. Warming up continues to be sound advice and you should do it, but there is now some disagreement about stretching out. Some people in sports medicine now recommend that you stretch after exercise instead of before. The premise is that it can loosen tight muscles and lessen soreness after exercise, but that before exercise it can stress muscles and increase the risk of some types of injuries. Again, I’m not qualified to opine, I’m just passing it along.