best sport EVER
WARNING: This article contains information that may trigger muscle contractions in readers who participated in the Phoenix Cactus Classic Field Hockey Tournament this past weekend. Read with caution.
In mid-December, I played a pick-up field hockey game in Fort Collins, Colorado with friends. We played for about an hour and half—a rewarding workout but not overexerting. I wasn’t tired the next day, nor was I nervous about participating in a two-day tournament in Phoenix six weeks later. Field hockey, yay, field hockey, my muscles were telling me.
Fast forward those six weeks to the tournament. I’d tried to keep a base level of fitness in the in-between, running, biking, yogaing and/or swimming with some sort of regularity. I even ran five sprints across a goose poop covered field one day. Regardless, I failed to make it to even one field hockey session, and when game day came my muscles had all but forgotten how to contract and lengthen in field hockey fashion.
Still, I was feeling okay on Saturday. Slight Pain in the right IT band, but nothing big. By evening I felt tired, hungry, easily buzzed off the tournament party keg beer, but not too sore.
Sunday was an onslaught of pain.
I was far from pain’s only victim. One of my teammates walked onto the field with his legs and torso forming a stiff 90 degree angle, another had a dead-eyed look for the rest of the tournament. We all managed to regain the necessary amount of flexibility to play our last game, but there was a lot of “I never used to feel this way”/”Getting old sucks” chatter.
The name of this phenomenon is Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness and it’s far from unique to old people and/or field hockey players (though we do experience DOMS most acutely because field hockey is inarguably the most physically and mentally multi-dimensional sport in existence). There are three types of muscle contractions—those that lengthen muscles (eccentric contractions), those in which the muscles remain static (isometric contractions) and those that shorten muscles (concentric contractions). When you curl a dumbell into your chest, you are shortening your muscles. When you slowly bring the dumbell back down to your side, you are elongating them.
Eccentric exercises are the hardest because the muscles are working against forces. In the previous example, the muscles in your biceps are working against gravity and the weight of the dumbell, so they are decelerating the speed of the dumbell’s movement as they lengthen out to their original position. Eccentric exercises include any sort of muscle movement that requires breaking after a quick acceleration, including swinging and twisting motions, quick sprints and stops, squats, jumps and, eh, oh I just deconstructed the sport of field hockey. Look at that.
DOMS is worst in the 12-48 hours after a new bout of hard physical activity, meaning that if we were to play in a similar tournament this weekend we’d leave feeling pretty normal. Unfortunately for us, the next one isn’t until April.
Until them, keep it eccentric, field hockey gurus.
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