Muscle pain can be excruciating and could be made worse by certain activities.  Pain in the muscles may start as slight soreness and could gradually or swiftly become a painful situation.  Soreness occurs when lactic acid builds up around the muscle region.  In some cases, muscles may tear and a person could experience pain.

Muscle pain or aches, which are also known as myalgia is unfortunately extremely common and people generally experience some sort of muscle pain during some point in their lives.  Everyone gets trigger pain at some point and there could be active and latent trigger points in the body [1].

There could also be ways to minimize the occurrence of muscle pain and ways to avoid making muscle pain worse.  Generally, muscle pain occurs for reasons or as a result of trigger points that include the presence of too much pressure, stress or tension on a muscle. In some cases, this occurrence of pressure, stress and tension on the muscles is as a result of some type of physical activity.

Other trigger points may include lack of proper nutrition, poor flexibility and muscle imbalances.  It is important to note why and how muscle pain occurs and this could help to prevent it from becoming worse.  These are the trigger points that would need to be avoided to stay free of muscle pain or to also prevent existing muscle pain from getting worse.

Hence, the following are 7 things that you may be doing everyday that could be making muscle pain worse.

#1 – Missing Essential Nutrients. 

Naturally, the body needs food and preferably, good food.  There can various types of food that people consume.  Unfortunately, not all food provides the nutrients that are needed to properly sustain the body and keep it in the tip-top shape that is required to fight off infection, inflammation and various types of ailments effectively.  If you are missing essential nutrients in your diet and doing this on a daily basis, you could be making any existing muscle pain you have worse.

Good nutrition includes the right amounts of protein, carbohydrates, good fats, minerals and vitamins that help re-build the body cells, strengthen the immune system and keep muscles in good condition.  When adequate nutrition is lacking, the basic building blocks needed to keep the body functioning well are missing and this puts the entire body including the network of muscles in the body in a state of high vulnerability.

#2 – Poor Flexibility. 

Flexibility may not come naturally for some people and the body may also have trigger points such as knotted muscle tissue that need to be released [2].  The body is interesting in the way it approaches flexibility.  You can move toward positive flexibility in which you are very nimble and able to stretch in different directions.

Flexibility could be improved with various types of activities including exercise, yoga or simply stretching routines.  However, with a less active lifestyle, poor flexibility could occur and this is detrimental to the muscles and limbs.  People need to move and when movement or flexibility becomes foreign to an individual, soreness and pain can occur.

You could take steps to improve or increase your flexibility by stretching or doing other exercises that allow the muscles to relax and gain the flexibility needed to function appropriately.  Living a sedentary life can lead to poor flexibility.

#3 – Muscle Imbalances.

When muscles are not balanced, you could exacerbate muscle pain or actually cause such pain to occur.  Apart from missing nutrients, trigger points could also be used to refer to other things including a part of the muscle that is stiffer, tighter or possibly weaker and most likely sore when touched or pushed and many sports injuries can be traced back to the existence or development of trigger points in the fascia or muscle [3]. When there are such imbalances in the muscles, a person may be more prone to increasing any pain currently being experienced in the muscles.

#4 – Stress on the Muscles. 

The exertion of too much pressure or stress on the muscles is also another way that your muscles could rapidly become sore and continued stress on the muscles or joints can make the pain worse.  Hence, if you remove the stress on the muscles, you may notice that your muscles begin to heal and possibly becomes less painful.  Also painful or sore muscles could experience stress during activities that should not or may not necessarily seem harmful.

For instance, sleeping should be quite harmless and actually good for the body.  However, there are times that a person wakes up with sore and painful muscles.  This may be as a result of the position of the body during sleep.  As we sleep, we may place unnecessary stress on different muscles and such exertion of stress or pressure on the muscles for extended periods of time, such as during an entire night of sleep could make us wake up with aching or painful muscles.

#5 – Overdoing Activities. 

Perhaps one of the most common ways to get painful muscles is through some type of physical activity.  Being too sedentary can cause muscle pain when the muscles eventually need to move.  However, the other extreme which could involve being too active or overdoing an activity.  Sometimes, such straining of the muscles during activities may occur in a random manner.

You may be performing or engaging in an activity and unfortunately take a wrong turn or apply too much pressure in a certain area that results in painful muscles.  Sometimes, people try to stretch themselves beyond what they should normally be doing.  If you are overdoing an activity frequently, you could be putting pressure on your muscles and muscles need rest.  Sometimes, the pain and damage being done may not be immediately apparent. However, you could be building up the degree of soreness and suffering that your muscles and joints may be going through.

#6 – Doing an Activity Incorrectly. 

Imagine doing an activity an incorrect way and doing so frequently. This could be a trigger point for muscle pain. This may be different from overdoing an activity because you may be doing or performing an activity correctly but overdoing it. For example, you could be playing basketball or any other sport on a daily or somewhat less frequent basis and also be using the right technique. Hence, your joints and muscles are not in jeopardy due to the absence technique.

However, in overdoing an activity, you are exerting too much pressure and stress on the muscles because you are over-using these muscles and joints, especially within a small time-frame. On the contrary but also related to stress on the muscles, you could be using an incorrect technique and this could make a person more prone to getting injured.

Continual use of the wrong technique during activities may also worse muscle pain. For instance, imagine swimming in a way that uses the wrong technique. This incorrect technique could twist your muscles and joints in the wrong direction and when this occurs, you could be creating opportunities for muscle pain to progress. Thus, if you can stop doing the activity incorrectly, you may be able to reverse the occurrence of muscle pain.

#7 – Drugs, Medications and Medical Conditions. 

In the case of medical conditions, people are usually not actually making themselves ill on purpose.  However, something you may be doing every day, or almost every day, with respect to drugs, medications and medical conditions may be affecting the state of your muscles and causing muscle pain.  Illnesses such as colds, the flu, fibromyalgia and other sicknesses that provide symptoms of body cell distress, may take its own toll on the body and at such times it could be quite easy to make the condition in the body worse and introduce exaggerated conditions of joint and muscle soreness or aches.

Taking drugs could also affect myalgia or muscle aches and these drugs may include drugs that are not taken for specific medical issues but simply drugs that may be taken frequently for seemingly recreational purposes such as cocaine and other powerful narcotics.  There are other drugs such as statins and possibly other prescribed medications that could also be making muscle pain worse [4].

Especially in cases where a person has re-occurring muscle pain and it appears to be getting worse, there is the need to consider if there are things that are being done every day or with related frequency which may be making the pain worse.  The major culprits are typically related to nutrition and physical activity.  However, there are other things that should be considered as well.  Other contributing factors and triggers for muscle pain may need to be decoded from lifestyle activities and determining the pattern of the pain or associated factors could help in generating or providing relief.

Want to find out how to relieve your muscle pain then check out Trigger Point Solution here:

Rick Kaselj, MS

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