Moving Day! How to Skip the Muscle Soreness (My Fitness Journey – Vertex Fitness Diary 18)

It’s already been a year and a half since I started sharing monthly updates with you, and I’m thrilled to say that my husband and I just hit a big milestone–we bought our first house! We moved in this past week, and I can’t tell you how glad I am that I’ve been doing strength training, because muscle soreness is no joke and no fun.

Let me tell you something about moving. You do not know how much stuff you have. Do you think you know how much stuff you have? You are wrong. Do you regularly donate clothes that don’t fit and goods you don’t use? I don’t care. You still have no earthly clue of how much you actually own. Not until you literally pick up every single thing you own and put it in a truck and then pick it up again and put it in your new house. You will completely finish packing, and then you will clean your old place, and you will still find two carloads of I don’t even know what that you have to pick up and move.

But it’s the day after you move that you really suffer, right? That’s when the Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness or DOMS kicks you right in the teeth. And the back. And the quads. And the triceps. And of course you could not find the box that has the Advil in it if, so you just hunker down with a misshapen bag of broccoli florets as an ice pack that probably went bad during the move and suffer through it. But, folks! It does not have to be this way!

Personal training saved my butt. I woke up the day after my move vaguely traumatized but with zero muscle soreness!! How is this possible? Folks, I have moved 12 times in my twenty nine years. I have been sore all week every time. So why not this time? Two reasons–I am physically stronger, making the lifting and pulling less taxing on my body, and I am more physically aware of how to lift and pull safely without adding unnecessary strain.

Getting stronger is self-explanatory. I can now pick up heavier boxes with less work and effort than I did this time last year. My range of motion, and my ability to perform work throughout that entire range of motion, has also improved. That means less muscle pulls, overextension and strain injuries, which can cause muscle soreness. As easy as that, less pain. But I also attribute the lack of muscle soreness to my increased physical awareness. I now know what I can reliably pick up, and what I can’t. I’ve learned that pushing myself too far beyond my physical limits is not the way to grow, it’s the way to get hurt. I’ve also eliminated a lot of the grunting, straining, breath-holding, and grimacing that normally accompanies physically exertion, known around here as the Val Salva maneuver. That’s another way to do more work while minimizing injury.

Even if you have a desk job or are a blogger like me, you’re eventually going to have to use your body, and personal training has been a great way for me to prepare for that.