Contraction induced muscle injury: towards personalized training and recovery programs

Skeletal muscles can be injured by their own contractions. Such contraction-induced injury, often accompanied by delayed onset of muscle soreness, is a leading cause of the loss of mobility in the rapidly increasing population of elderly people. Unlike other types of muscle injuries which hurt almost exclusively those who are subjected to intensive exercise such as professional athletes and soldiers in training, contraction induced injury is a phenomenon which may be experienced by people of all ages while performing a variety of daily-life activities. Subjects that experience contraction induced injury report on soreness that usually increases in intensity in the first 24 h after the activity, peaks from 24 to 72 h, and then subsides and disappears in a few days. Despite their clinical importance and wide influence, there are almost no studies, clinical, experimental or computational, that quantitatively relate between the extent of contraction induced injury and activity factors, such as number of repetitions, their frequency and magnitude. The lack of such quantitative information is even more emphasized by the fact that contraction induced injury can be used, if moderate and controlled, to improve muscle performance in the long term. Thus, if properly understood and carefully implemented, contraction induced injury can be used for the purpose of personalized training and recovery programs. In this paper, we review experimental, clinical, and theoretical works, attempting towards drawing a more quantitative description of contraction induced injury and related phenomena.