Then the gremlins go to work. When you get up next morning, your leg muscles are so stiff and painful that you're reduced to a hobble. But as you sit there regretting that you raced up those inclines and that you need to do more exercise, don't feel too bad. If two Australian researchers are correct, it's going downhill, not uphill, that does the damage. And unfit people are no worse off, says David Morgan, research director of the Centre for Biomedical Engineering at Monash University in Melbourne.
Fit cyclists are more vulnerable than couch potatoes.
For most of us, the impact of this type of damage is just a few days' soreness. But for athletes, the sudden loss of muscle power can mean the difference between winning and losing. It's long been known that some types of exercise lead to muscle soreness. The damage was thought to be caused by electrical disturbance or a chemical problem, such as an imbalance of calcium. But no one theory accounted for all the damage.