A New Supplement for Soreness?

A new year means hordes of people resolve to get in shape and begin working out for the first time in 11 months. And many of you regular gym goes probably took a couple weeks off with the holidays.

What happens?

You go to the gym filled with enthusiasm and you start working out. You feel pretty keen, so you keep adding more weight, doing more sets, and more exercises. You leave the gym feeling good — maybe even great — but the next day you wake up a wee bit sore.

Two days after your first workout of 2010 you feel worse, you can’t lift your arms over your head, and you decide washing your hair isn’t that important anyway.

You’ve just met every weight lifter’s friend and enemy — delayed onset muscle soreness.

Delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS)

Oh nooo... I have to walk down the stairs...

Delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) is that muscle soreness and stiffness you get one to two days after you’ve worked out.

It isn’t a sharp pain, but it is painful enough that you to figure out a new way to walk up and down stairs without bending your knees — yes it’s possible, but you look a bit like Frankenstein.

Getting some DOMS lets you know you’re overloading the muscle; too much and you have problems with everyday things like squatting to use the toilet.

What causes DOMS?

After years of scientists studying DOMS you’d think they’d have figured it out, but nope. Sure there are a few theories out there, but nobody is quite sure what causes DOMS.

Some of the more popular theories are [1]:

1. Lactic acid build-up. Every once and a while I still hear this theory of muscle soreness, but it makes no sense since you can get DOMS without lactic acid build-up.
2. Muscle spasm. This is a cyclical problem where exercise blocks blood to the muscle (ischemia), then metabolic waste products accumulate in the muscle. This causes the muscle to spasm, then you get even less blood to the muscle.
3. Tissue damage. Basically tissue damage causes a series of physiological events that make you sore.

The winner: Tissue damage causes DOMS

Today, scientists think that tissue damage from too much force on muscle and connective tissue causes DOMS.

You’d figure if this was the reason you’d feel the pain right away, but the pain isn’t from the damage itself. Instead it’s from the muscle’s reaction to the damage.

The process from “energized and feeling good post-workout you” to “I can’t bend my knees you” is a series of six events [2-3]:

1. You overload the muscle. When you lift weight that challenges the muscle you overload the muscle and connective tissue in and around the muscle.
2. Muscle cells are damaged at three regions from the overload:
   1. The muscle cell membrane (or sarcolemma) is damaged during lifting.
   2. Contractile proteins (actin and myosin) fail. Contractile proteins are the proteins that make your muscle contract or shorten.
   3. The internal muscle communication membrane (sarcoplasmic reticulum – a larger more extensive endoplasmic reticulum) fails.
3. The muscle cell is overloaded with calcium because of the cellular damage. When muscle cells are damaged, calcium ends up everywhere, like in the mitochondria (the power plant of the cell).
4. Muscle cells are degraded because calcium tells enzymes to eat the cell. With all this calcium floating around, the muscle cell clean-up team is activated (proteolytic & phospholipytic enzymes). The clean-up team breaks down proteins (troponin & tropomyosin) and membranes (sarcolemma & sarcoplasmic reticulum).
5. The muscle becomes inflamed because of all the cellular degradation. All this cell destruction triggers your body to activate a couple of very specific immune system cells (macrophages & mast cells).
6. The muscle becomes swollen because of the inflammation. Inflammation causes warming and swelling in and around the muscle. Finally, it’s at this stage when you start feeling pain because the swelling and heat activate your pain nerve endings.

These steps take time, which is why you don’t feel the pain right away.

Anybody who’s worked out with any consistency knows that after a while you stop getting sore from your workouts.

Part of the reason is that your body makes stress proteins to protect your muscle cells from more damage. But if you stop working out, your body stops making these stress proteins because you don’t need the protection anymore.

How to reduce muscle soreness?

You can stop muscle soreness one way — never work out or do anything remotely physically strenuous. Lie in bed and breathe deeply.

Okay, I’m just kidding.

The truth is, you can’t completely stop muscle soreness. But there are a few things you can try to help reduce DOMS [1], though why they work is unclear in most cases:

1. Vitamin C – 100 mg/day (double the RDA) is suggested though that’s probably on the low side, but it should help with the inflammation [3].
2. Ice – icing your sore muscle (or cold water immersion) will also help with the inflammation.
3. Drink lots of water – drinking water seems to help by flushing the calcium and debris so there is less of an immune response from the body.
4. Non-steroidal anti-inflammatories – medications like aspirin and Advil are anti-inflammatories and can help with both pain and inflammation. However, because these can cause liver damage and gastrointestinal damage, they’re not recommended as an everyday method.
5. Take α-hydroxy-iscaproic acid? This is a new supplement that may protect the muscle cell from damage.

A case of the HICA-ps

α-hydroxy-isocaproic acid, or HICA for short, is a new supplement (and the end metabolite of leucine degradation in muscle) that is being promoted to reduce muscle soreness, increase lean muscle, decrease body fat and help muscle performance – sounds great!

There is one problem. There are only two studies looking at this supplement, and they both were done by the same lab. As I’ve said before, never believe something that comes only comes from one lab.

This first study was actually an unpublished pilot study done on wrestlers without a control group, so you can’t say with any certainty that HICA was the reason for any changes in the wrestlers [4].

Since this is such a new supplement I’ve decided it would be interesting to review one of the initial studies and see where HICA ends up in 5 or 10 years. This week’s review looks at the latest research on HICA and DOMS:

Mero AA, Ojala T, Hulmi JJ, Puurtinen R, Karila TA, Seppala T. Effects of alfa-hydroxy-isocaproic acid on body composition, DOMS and performance in athletes. J Int Soc Sports Nutr. 2010 Jan 5;7(1):1.

Methods

The participants were 15 male soccer players (footballers for everybody outside of North America) put into either:

• a placebo group (7 players) that got 650 mg of maltodextrin three times/day
• a HICA group (8 players) that got 500 mg of HICA three times/day

The study lasted four weeks, with everybody taking part in 5-7 training sessions (3-4 soccer practices, 1-2 resistance training session and 1 soccer game).

Resistance training days were either:

• maximal strength (low repetitions, between 3-8); or
• speed strength (lighter weight, 50% of 1 repetition maximum).

Using dual energy X-ray absorption (DXA) the scientists figure out how much lean body mass and fat mass the players had. The players kept a diary recording how much muscle soreness they experienced, on a scale from 1 to 5.

Results

Compared to the placebo group, the HICA group:

• gained more total weight;
• gained more lean body mass;
• had more of an increase in lower body lean body mass (nothing earth shattering, though: just 400 grams in the HICA group & 150 grams in the placebo group);
• had less DOMS after 4 weeks; and
• had no difference in body fat.

Conclusion

After only 4 weeks and with a small group of participants, finding any sort of difference between the placebo group and the HICA group is remarkable.

Researchers found HICA works to decrease DOMS with only 4 strength training sessions over a short four weeks and with only 15 participants – that’s very impressive.

A longer study focusing more on strength training with more participants should give even greater differences in lean body mass and muscle soreness with HICA.

Bottom line

HICA seems to be a promising supplement for both increasing muscle and decreasing muscle soreness, but I’d wait for a few more studies before I’d give it a try.

Keep your eyes open and if in a few years you see a flood of HICA supplements, they may be worth a try. Till then, keep on Frankenstein waddling.

References

1. Zatsiorsky Vladimir M and Kraemer Williiam J. Science and Practice of Strength Training 2^nd Edition. Champaign IL: Human Kinetics; 2006: 125-126.
2. Brooks George A, Fahey Thomas D and White Timothy P. Exercise Physiology: Human Bioenergetics and Its Applications 2^nd edition. Toronto, Canada: Mayfield Publishing Company; 1996: 400-401.
3. McComas AJ. “Skeletal Muscle: Form and Function: Chapter 21: Injury and Repair.” Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics; 1996.
4. Hietala, P. Karila, T. Seppälä T. and Tähtivuori K. Nutrient supplement and use of the same.  Oy Extract Ltd. 2005. Patent Number PCT/FI2005/050365