Hate Leg Day? This Extract Can Help Reduce Muscle Soreness
If you train legs and can wake up the next couple of days feeling like a million bucks, then you didn’t train legs. We all know what follows any brutal leg day — the inability to sit down to take a dump, the look of fear when you see multiple flights of stairs, and the all too famous duck walk due to muscle soreness. You’ve paid your dues in order to build massive wheels, and DOMS is the real deal. However, there now appears to be a new extract that can help reduce muscle soreness (and not just from leg day).
Lemon Verbena Extract? Say What? This Can Help Reduce Muscle Soreness?
A group of researchers were looking for a natural supplement that could be used to help reduce muscle soreness following intense bouts of exercise. What they found was that lemon verbena extract fits the bill.
To conduct the study, researchers gathered 40 participants (consisting of both men and women) who were moderately active and between the ages of 22 and 50 which is a pretty diverse age range. Each group was either given 200mg of maltodextrin (as the placebo) or 200mg of a product containing the lemon verbena extract to take twice a day for 10 days.
Participants were then asked to complete lower body exercise tests (a jump protocol) for the following five days (total length of the study was 15 days) where maximum effort was recorded and analyzed. The researchers mentioned that they placed an additional 10% weight (calculated based off of their current body weight) on the participants prior to the lower body tests. The participants were then asked to complete a 200-repetition max-effort jump protocol.
The researchers then analyzed each participant’s soreness in the following days by using a seven-question questionnaire. The participants were to answer the questions prior to engaging in the jump protocol as well as 24, 48, 72, and 96 hours following their test. In addition, the researchers checked the participant’s creatine kinase levels, interleukin-6 levels, and glutathione peroxidase levels to analyze both oxidative stress at the cellular level as well as actual muscle damage.
The questions asked on the questionnaire were geared towards pain levels in relation to normal daily activities like what all of us would go through on a daily basis following an intense leg workout such as sitting down on a chair and getting up from a chair along with other tasks.
After analyzing all of the data, the researchers found that the group who supplemented with the lemon verbena extract had less muscle soreness and damage when compared to the placebo group who used maltodextrin. In addition, they found that overall recovery time post-exercise was also improved with the group who supplemented with the lemon verbena extract.
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