Although it’s normal to feel tight and stiff once in a while, especially when you’ve been inactive for a while, chronic muscle tightness is increasingly becoming a significant fitness problem worldwide. Fitness artists attribute the steady rise in cases of muscle stiffness to the contemporary lifestyle, which is mainly sedentary. This article explains the leading causes of muscle tightness because of modern living.

What’s Muscle Tightness?

Also referred to as muscle tension, stiffness, or rigor, muscle tightness is the inability of your muscles to relax usually and elongate fully. This condition affects all muscles in your body and is characterized by pain when you stretch your muscles or make infrequent movements.

How Modern Lifestyle Causes Muscle Tightness

Muscle tightness usually occurs when you stay inactive for a long time. Today’s lifestyle doesn’t involve a lot of physical activity. However, studies have revealed that muscle stiffness can occur when you perform challenging physical activities like lifting heavy weights. You are likely to develop muscle tightness when you start a new workout routine or increase the intensity of your daily workouts.

Currently, the internet, print media, and television screens are awash with messages from fitness experts encouraging people to be more physically active. Undoubtedly, being physically active has numerous benefits like improving your overall health, maintaining the correct body weight, being flexible, and staying fit. But the fitness experts fail to tell you that your physical exercises may result in muscle tightness.

When you start a new fitness routine or increase the intensity of your current workouts, your muscles are forced to work harder, causing microscopic injuries to your muscle fibers. This causes soreness and tightness of muscles after the training. Health experts refer to this type of injury as Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS).

So, while a sedentary lifestyle is a significant risk factor, increased physical activity is equally unsafe. If your work involves standing or walking for many hours, your muscles face the same risk of stiffness as those who spend the whole day seated behind a desk. The two workers might end up experiencing stiffness in the same muscle groups, and the two lifestyles usually affect muscles in your back and lower body.

Therefore, you need to find the right balance between being physically active and passive. Ask your fitness trainer for advice on the most effective exercises to engage in without straining your muscles. Nevertheless, you have to engage in some form of physical activity regularly to strengthen your muscles and give them the necessary flexibility.