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You might not know it by our country’s obesity epidemic, but we certainly do love our muscles. We see them on everything from magazine covers and CD cases to Brad Pitt movie posters and Times Square billboards. Despite our visual fascination with the lean mass of tissue that swiped the term “six-pack” from the beer industry, muscles are really important because of their physical function. The 650 muscles in our body give us the strength to do everything. While we all have varied levels of muscle mass, all of our muscles work the same way. Attached to ligaments, muscles are made up of tissues that contract and relax. To understand how they work, think of an extendable ladder that is extended—that’s your muscle at rest. When you put tension on one end, the ladder ratchets together and consolidates the rungs—
making the ladder shorter. When you release tension on your muscle, it relaxes and extends back to its rest length. A muscle works when you put it under a certain amount of tension, and the energy you consume (food) gives you the power to contract and relax. When a muscle is under full tension during a workout, it is actually damaged by that tension, but it grows when it recovers. When you put your muscles under just the right amount of tension (that at threshold), that’s when you feel soreness—a soreness is caused by toxins in that damaged muscle. (Postworkout massage and stretching have been shown to reduce muscle soreness because they both help work those toxins away from the muscle to be drained in the lymphatic system.) Too much tension, and a muscle rips—that’s not soreness; that’s pain

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