How to speed up recovery | It’s all about blood flow

Once in a while, I get this pain in either my pec or my lat. It feels like DOMS but slightly more stinging sensation. 

I once had this pain in my left lat and kept going and pushed past the pain which resulted in it hurting even more. After one workout it hurt enough where I decided I would not train my lat until the pain subsided. I was unable to do pull-ups for two months.

After this incident it was always my strategy to take ~7-10 days off when I felt this pain to prevent another 2 month disaster. However recently I tried a new strategy that I have used to immediately remove this pain.

It’s all about blood flow

About two months after my left lat felt better, I started to feel the same pain in my right one. It would hurt when I did pull-ups. I was so frustrated because I just got back to my strength pre-injury.

This time, I decided I would not go cold turkey again and not do pulling movements for 7-10 days. So what I did was I went to the lat pull-down machine and put an extremely light 40lbs and checked if I could do it pain-free. It didn’t hurt so I did it for 30 reps and it felt nice. I then put on 55lbs , then 70 lbs, and kept doing it for 20-30 reps, I did it all the way to 115lbs. I was getting a nice pump in my lats.

The next day I came in and did the same thing. At the end of it, when I attempted pull-ups it didn’t hurt anymore so I did 100 (20 sets of 5 pullups on a 30 second interval).

“Blood circulation transports nutrients throughout the body, helps manage waste production, improves muscle recovery after a workout, and accelerates healing.”

If you have muscle pain or are trying to prevent an injury I highly recommend doing light weight high rep work in the beginning of after you workouts. Many of light weight work can be done with resistance bands  so even doing them on rest days would be beneficial.