So what's probably happening here ? And I just , I just hate to give you another bone , but a lot of delayed on some muscle soreness is probably just a neural feedback loop rather than it is actual muscle damage makes a lot of sense . There's a lot of interactions between the um types of neurons that control touch , sensation and pain , sensation and itch sensation .
So anytime we , we rub a , you know , like a Charlie horse , our leg or we or we stub our toe and we , you know , we wince and then we grab the toe and we got like squeezing it a little bit that's actually deactivating or partially inactivating the the pain mechanism . So the idea that uh a swelling response would then trigger a neural response that that then would recruit the pain receptor response here . I'm using broad , broad brush um strokes here to explain this um makes very good sense to me .
Um Now and only now that you've explained how this process works , I can actually even add more to that . So if you remember how muscles work , so we have to have some sort of signal from the nervous system that has to actually go in and tell the muscle to contract . Well , remember there a few episodes ago , we covered uh the physiology here of what's called the motor unit .
Well , one theory that's been put forward regarding muscle damage is that the pressure is actually being applied to those nerve endings of the muscle spindles . And that's actually responsible for the pain signal that's going back and coming up to your brain . And you're registering that as pain rather than it is actually in the , the contractile units .
So the gamma is gonna go back to the central location and then come back to the alpha motor neurons and tell it to contract . So you have this wonderful mechanism of sensing stretch going back . Well , one theory that's been put forward regarding muscle damage is that the pressure is actually being applied to those nerve endings of the muscle spindles .
