Reasons for getting shaky muscles during rigorous workouts

Almost everyone who performs their workouts diligently has experienced that shaky and trembling feeling in their muscles after completing that tough session.

If you have ever experienced that shaky and trembling feeling in your muscles during your workout sessions, then there are possibly three common and perfectly normal reasons for them – 

Fatigue

The most common reason for experiencing those shaky muscles is fatigue. However, before discussing how fatigue is responsible for that feeling of shaky muscles during workout sessions, we need to understand what exactly goes on inside our body during the contraction of our muscles.

Muscle contraction sounds like child’s play when we think of it on a surface level. Still, many activities are happening inside the body to make that one action possible. Nerve cells, also known as motor neurons, send a chemical message through the nervous system to target a particular muscle (or muscles) which instructs the muscle fibres to contract.

However, not all the muscle fibres in a muscle group contract at the same time once the signal is sent. Instead, the fibres distribute the task among themselves. Some fibres perform the task while others rest, then change places with each other. “Your body very smartly activates the right amount of fibers for the task that has been assigned to them. So, for performing a task like a contraction, our muscle fibres keep distributing the work amongst themselves as long as we hold on to that contracting position.

Your muscle fibres get more and more fatigued the longer you perform a movement or hold onto a position, which clearly decreases the efficiency of the muscle contraction, which then results in the feeling of shakiness. When this happens, it is usually recommended to drop the intensity or stop performing the activity.

The upside of all of this is that, as you keep performing the same activity regularly, your muscle fibres start getting used to the activity, and you will not get the feeling of shakiness as soon as you were getting it earlier. However, to achieve that feeling of shakiness, you have to either keep performing the same movement or activity till your muscle fibres start getting fatigued and you can’t perform the same movement any longer or else you can increase the load at which you were performing the movement to an extent where your range of motion doesn’t get cut short. As your body gets stronger by performing the same movement repeatedly, the efficiency of signalling and activating the right muscle fibres keeps improving, reducing shakiness frequency.

Dehydration

Dehydration can have quite a significant impact on the level of your performance while working out, and it does not take much to see those impacts. Dehydration, even at the lowest rate, where you lose about 1-2% of your body weight from sweating, can impact your performance, which can be seen quite clearly.

Blood flow is an essential part when we discuss muscles and muscle contraction. Still, dehydration adversely affects the blood flow in the muscles, due to which essential nutrients such as electrolytes are unable to reach the working muscles. The lack of adequate blood flow and nutrients like electrolytes in your working muscles can diminish the efficiency level of muscle contraction and make you more susceptible to tremors or muscle cramps. These adverse effects can undoubtedly hinder your exercise performance and achieving your fitness goals more challenging.

Therefore, being hydrated is quite necessary while performing your workouts, and more so for having efficiency in your performance. So drinking enough water in your pre, intra and post workouts can help you to maintain your body’s fluid balance, improve blood flow, and keep your muscles filled with an adequate amount of essential nutrients like electrolytes, which will eventually help you perform better in the gym.

New Exercise Or Movement

The nerve cells that coordinate with the muscle fibres of our body and send signals regarding when to contract a particular muscle group are able to function in an efficient manner by repeating the process again and again, or in other words when any specific movement is done again and again. So when learning any new activity, the muscles may show some shakiness and tremor at the beginning as the body is not used to that specific movement, and also because nerve cells and muscle fibres are not able to communicate and coordinate with each other properly because the body has never performed the movement. Slowly and gradually, as the number of repetitions of that particular movement starts increasing, the nerve cells and muscle fibres are able to establish a coordinated pattern with each other.

However, in the beginning, the shakiness that is seen during the initial stage of learning any new movement is a part of the learning process and, in fact, an essential part of motor skill development, which also indicates the body’s ability to adapt and improvise its motor control and movement coordination by repetitive practice.

Learn More:- Optimal Training Volume For Muscle Growth

Bottom Line

When being introduced to any new movement you have never performed before, experiencing tremors and shaky muscle feelings is common. But this should not be a reason to get discouraged or to simply give up. Instead, it is necessary to execute that movement safely and gradually allow your body to get used to the intensity and complexity of the new movement and provide your body with the opportunity to establish a communicative pattern between the nerve cells and muscle fibres.

Therefore, to learn and master the new exercise, it is often recommended to approach it with patience as this approach will help in preventing any kind of injuries and also helps in performing the exercise in a very efficient manner.