My son is currently going through a growth spurt right now, so I can imagine he is experiencing muscle soreness, not like what we get when introduced to a new training program but I'm sure it has its similarities in feeling.
I was also reminded last week about this phenomenon in one of my boot camp groups.
I introduced a few new exercises to the group and the next day, the stories they told about how they struggled down stairs and squatting down to pick something up was a little amusing but more eye opening.
I guess it was something I kind of knew would happen but not to the degree it did.
One of the exercises in particular was called the Pistol.
It is a single leg squat and has several degrees of difficulty usually revolving around the depth at which you squat.
Well I introduced that to the group, and they didn't do a lot of them (25 per leg over the course of the workout), but the soreness they experienced the next day was clear.
There were two things that caused this: A brand new exercise which caused a new stress to the muscles that it wasn't used to.
The result is an overload of the muscle, hence the muscle soreness.
The other thing that caused this is the fact that it was a single leg exercise utilizing the lower body.
These moves can be quite intense and force the body to overload in strength as well as balance.
Unfortunately there is often a misconception revolving muscle soreness and exercise intensity.
Among some groups of people there is the thought that if I'm not sore the next day than the workout wasn't intense enough, or the workout did nothing for me.
That is definitely not the case.
Muscle soreness only occurs when a muscle is stressed in a way it isn't used to being stressed.
However a workout can still provide amazing results even if muscle soreness doesn't occur.
Calories are still being burned and provided it isn't the same workout you have been doing longer then four to six weeks, then you are still getting tremendous benefit from the exercise.
Proper hydration and recovery nutrition also play a large role into the degree and how much muscle soreness you endure.
An optimized nutrition plan complete with multivitamin, adequate water intake and a plan pre and post workout recovery meal and your muscle soreness will be minimized.
But that isn't to say that muscle soreness isn't bad from time to time.
But don't make it a trend.
Just as exercise stress is often positive over time, muscle soreness is a stress that should be experienced once in a while.
Muscle soreness is that kind of stress that if experienced too much, can be negative to the body and the results you are looking for.
Look for muscle soreness to happen with new exercises or new workouts in your routine, but the rest of the time, good old fashion fatigue will do.